Events

“Difficult Heritage and Memory in the Making” is an interdisciplinary and itinerant summer school based in Belarus and Lithuania, taking place on August 1-12, 2016.

Based in Vilnius and the transborder region of Lithuania and Belarus, this Summer School is devoted to the heritage of missing ethnic groups in the aftermath of genocide and traumatic population shifts, or heritage of atrocity. We are interested in how the memory of the absent (missing Jewish population, relocated ethnic minorities, silenced historical narratives) is being handled by the local inhabitants, factored into the dominant narratives (museum exhibitions, tourist information folders, etc.) and represented in space (the invisible and forgotten sites related to the absent ethnic minorities, Holocaust sites and other contested sites).

NB! Applicants are invited to send their CV and a cover letter describing their field of interest by March 30, 2016 to: difficult.heritage @ gmail.com

Taking as a case study the Lithuanian-Belarusian borderlands, this Summer School will offer unique hands-on workshops in historical and ethnographic methodologies. Joining talks of invited experts with field-trips, it will allow young researchers to apply the acquired skills in oral history interviewing techniques, ethnographic photography, or digital history.

The Summer School is open to PhD researchers and young scholars from the fields of history, ethnography, Eastern European Studies and related disciplines. Travel, accommodation, visa and other costs are covered by the organizers.

Organized by University of Bremen, Research Centre of East European Studies in Bremen, European Humanities University, Vilnius University and Geschichtswerkstatt Minsk, with the kind support of the Volkswagen-Foundation.

Further info: JProf. Dr. Magdalena Waligórska, University of Bremen, mwaligor @ uni-bremen.de and Dr. Stsiapan Stureika, European Humanities University, stsiapan. stureika @ ehu.lt