Education and post-communist transitional justice: negotiating the communist past in a memorial museum

Abstract

This paper examines the role of education within post-communist transitional justice. It focuses on the ways in which young Romanians negotiate the communist past during an educational visit to a memorial museum. The museum enabled these visitors to better understand the repression of the communist era, had limited impact in changing their attitudes towards communism, but it did provoke reflection upon and comparison between the present and the communist past. Visitors recognized the role of the museum as a site of memory within post-communist transitional justice, but were also critically aware of the limitations to what the museum could achieve. The implications of these findings for post-communist transitional justice are examined.

Museums and Transitional Justice: Assessing the Impact of a Memorial Museum on Young People in Post-Communist Romania

“…It specifically focuses on two issues: opinions about a former repressive regime and the role of memorial museums within transitional justice projects. These are issues which we have examined in previous research among visitors to a memorial museum [27]. In this paper, we extend this analysis through comparing the responses of visitors and non-visitors in order to examine the impact of visiting the museum in shaping these opinions.…”

“…The "visiting" group was comprised of 43 of the 45 students who had visited the museum during the fieldtrip, while the 18 students who had not attended the fieldtrip constituted the "non-visiting" group. Some aspects of the experiences (both cognitive and emotional) of the "visiting" group have been reported elsewhere [26,27].…”

“…Memorial museums established within transitional justice projects will attract a diverse audience [26], but an important distinction can be made between citizens with first-hand experience of past political violence and later generations with no such experience. Educating the latter group is central to transitional justice [27,35] to ensure that past suffering is not forgotten. Consequently, a range of educational initiatives can be adopted to ensure that younger people are aware of the circumstances of past violence and the experiences of their parents and grandparents.…”

“…Consequently, a range of educational initiatives can be adopted to ensure that younger people are aware of the circumstances of past violence and the experiences of their parents and grandparents. Memorial museums can have a particularly important role to play in such initiatives [16,27,36].…”

“…We then introduce an empirical study of how young Romanians (who have no direct experience of living under communism) respond to the museum. In previous papers [26,27], we have examined the experiences of young people when visiting the museum. Here, we seek to explore the impact of the museum in more detail by comparing the responses of those who had visited the museum with those who had not.…”