Institutional apologies for historical injustices can be conceived as acts of symbolic inclusion directed to people whose collective experiences and memories of the past have not been recognized in the hegemonic narratives of the past. However, in this article it is argued that such apologies also have exclusionary potential as vehicles of symbolic politics of citizenship in that they may designate the apologizing community so that it effectively excludes cultural 'aliens', like migrants, from the community of 'remedial' citizens. The article suggests a crucial point is the rhetoric shifts when one is appealing to both cultural and political solidarity, as when apologizing in the name of the state but simultaneously invoking 'our' nation and 'our' history. Thus the increasing number of institutional historical apologies is not necessarily incompatible with the trend of reinforcing the symbolic boundaries around 'our' historical-cultural communities that has been visible recently, for example, in the demands for cultural canons and citizenship tests in many Western societies.
History education comprises moral issues and moral aspects, often perceived as an important and meaning-making foundation that makes learning relevant and interesting. The interrelationship between time layers fuels historical interpretations and facilitates perceptions of moral issues. This article focuses on a study investigating how secondary school students express inter-temporal relationships in encounters with a morally challenging historical event, which for the participants would have been a moral dilemma. Using historical consciousness as the theoretical framework, a matrix linking two prominent theoretical models – Jörn Rüsen’s (2004) types of narratives and Ann Chinnery’s (2013) strands of historical consciousness – was developed to analyse and categorize secondary school students’ expressions of temporal orientation. To carry out the research, 15-year-old Finnish and Swedish students read an excerpt from Christopher Browning’s (2017) book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (originally published in 1992). The students answered and discussed open-ended questions regarding the relevance of the text to their lives and others’ lives, and the applicability of this historical situation to Europe now and in the future. Using this empirical material, the analysis provides a tentative overarching depiction of students’ expressions of temporal orientation, and reports on findings of how temporal orientations relate to moral reflection.
In this paper I review a number of explanations for the emergence of the modern homosexual category in Western (mainly Northwest European) cultures. I suggest there are four different emphases in respect of the social and cultural factors given priority in interpretations of the formation of the homosexual category. Of course, individual studies have often taken into consideration more than one single factor (most notably, Greenberg, 1988;Chauncey, 1994), and the grouping of previous studies that I here suggest only indicates where the focus of a given study is. The social and cultural factors emphasized in these four approaches are: 1) the effects of competitive capitalism on the bourgeois/middle class political economy of sexuality and sexual morals; 2) the rise of expert knowledges, controlling systems, and modern bureaucracies; 3) tensions within gender order and the struggle over new definitions of gender roles; 4) the rise of free wage labour, the proliferation of urban anonymity, and the unfolding of new modes of existence in the life-world of modern pluralist urban society.Finally, the article briefly considers the potential erosion of the homosexual vs. heterosexual divide in the light of the historical background. Almost thirty years have passed since 'The Homosexual Role', by Mary McIntosh (1968), the first notable contribution to the historical sociology of homosexuality operating within a social constructionist view of homosexuality. Since then, there have been numerous studies of the formation of the conceptual category and social aggregate of 'modern homosexual'. Researchers have differed about whether the pedigree of 'homosexual' and homosexual identities and subcultures in Western societies can be traced back to the late nineteenth century or to the
Using the history classroom as a context for ethics and moral education is a long, but also contested, tradition. Recently, more emphasis has been put on how to incorporate ethics education, with this paper exploring the spaces of ethics and moral education in the history classroom. It is argued here that insights from moral philosophy and theories of historical consciousness, but – importantly – also moral psychology and the study of moral emotions, are needed to realise the potential of history teaching and learning to support ethics education. Following this line, three spaces of ethics education in the history classroom are identified in this paper, including: reasoning about the moral quality of historical actors’ conduct; the use of historical empathy (perspective-taking); and reflection of the past’s moral meaning to the present and the future. As an example of how to implement this, a set of stimulus activities is presented that is designed for the classroom and a qualitative analysis of students’ responses that explicate expressions of students’ moral reasoning, perspective-taking, and historical consciousness.
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