Concerned about a lack of legitimacy, European Union (EU) institutions have increasingly engaged in memory politics to enhance European identity. Yet, memory of the EU is still closely connected to the collective identity formation of nation-states, especially in the field of education, the focus of this study. Inspired by this dilemma, the present paper examines the representations of European unification in textbooks of six countries: Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Hungary, and Estonia. By focusing on countries on the margins of Europe, the present study explores shared and diverse narratives of the European unification process and asks whether or not a shared historical charter of European unification exists. All together 86 history textbooks used in upper secondary school were analysed by adopting a threestep multi-method approach. The results suggest that the representation of European unification is more diverse than it is homogenous. It can be narrated as a political value community or as a community based on utilitarian interests, or it can be represented from a unified European or from a more national perspective. Exploring representations of European unification is crucial to understanding how they can be used as legitimizing charters to navigate through the European challenges of the 21st century.
This article will describe how a project documenting interviews with survivors of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries explores the relationship between psychology and advocacy. The Waterford Memories Project focuses on documenting survivor narratives both for subsequent qualitative analysis and a publicly accessible record of the women's experiences about events, which remain silenced and hidden in Irish society. The process of documenting the women's narratives is, in itself, an action toward social change because it chal-CONTACT
Personal stories often occupy an ambivalent place between social hegemony and social change. In personal stories of sexual assault, this ambivalent place can be particularly charged when the narrator’s story is contested or resisted by the listener. Stories of sexual assault can reflect dominant victim discourses, while simultaneously resisting the role of victim as a survivor works to organize and frame a trauma experience. Dominant cultural narratives of victimhood often reflect hegemonic discourses, which restrict coping by providing a narrow victim framework for a survivor of sexual assault. However, this ambivalent place between a narrowly defined victimhood and social change can also provide opportunity for survivors to resist these narrow narrative confines and progress through the trauma. This chapter will analyze personal stories of sexual assault and focus on how survivors’ constructions of self are challenged and fractious as a result of sexual assault. Examples of how the narrators resist the dominant victim narrative to move toward personal and social change in their coping will be considered.
The Magdalene Laundries are a prominent part of Irish social history, used by the Irish State and Religious Orders to incarcerate girls and women who were deemed to be immoral, including unmarried mothers, victims of sexual assault, and criminal justice system referrals. The Irish State and Religious Orders have restricted all access to their archives of these institutions, perpetuating the silencing and marginalization of the women’s experiences. This chapter considers the role of the Waterford Memories digital humanities project in contributing to affording agency to the Magdalene survivors. The methodology of oral history narratives will be critically considered to analyze their dual purpose of providing a way for the women to understand the meaning of their experiences, in addition to a permanent and public record of these first-hand accounts. The role of the project as a repository for cultural resource materials on the study of institutional abuse, and as an educational pedagogical tool, will also be discussed.
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