Building Transdisciplinary Relationships through Multidirectional Memory Work and Education

Abstract

Offering a blended form of collaborative and personal reflections, Dawn Smith and Helga Thorson discuss how their lives intersected through the I-witness Field School, a course on Holocaust memorialization offered by the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria. Contemplating what is remembered and what is forgotten not only in the context of collective and cultural memory but also through the realm of education, the authors of this article draw on Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory and Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory to advocate for a multidirectional and intergenerational education that leads to social change.

Memory in action: Reflections on multidirectionality’s possibilities in the classroom

“…It is only in the past few years that scholars have zeroed in on the potential of multidirectional memory in the classroom. Articles and book chapters detailing the uses of multidirectional memory have explored the relationship between multidirectional memory and intergenerational memory, its impact on decolonial thinking, and the practical uses of multidirectional memory to educational memory work in Germany (Arnold and Bischoff, 2023; Hansen, 2020; Smith and Thorson, 2019). Each of these pieces takes seriously Rothberg’s (2009) emphasis on multidirectional memory as, “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing as productive and not private” (p. 3).…”