Public history is a space where ordinary Afghans are able to push back on official narratives and result in a wider and more varied range of narratives that more accurately reflect Afghanistan’s multicultural history. #ifph2024

The Taliban has worked to control the physical representation of memory through tangible heritage. Resistance has also led to the creation of digital spaces to commemorate the past and protect grassroots narratives. #ifph2024

Ebtikar describes visiting schools in Afghanistan in 2019, and seeing posters made by students on the wall clearly illustrating historical events that fell outside of the Islamic Republic’s official narratives, making schools a site of resistance through history #ifph2024

(I’m really simplifying a sophisticated and nuanced analysis—we had some technical difficulties and so the speaker is really speeding up. This is work that’s well worth keeping an eye on!) #ifph2024

Nation-building efforts led by the US and NATO pushed narratives of unity by denigrating and eliminating recent conflicts and violence, like the Soviet-Afghan War. These sanitized narratives created dissonance between people’s lived experiences and the national story. #ifph2024

Since the Taliban’s takeover, they have actively sought to eliminate public sites of historical and cultural memory. The Taliban used this process to rewrite history of Afghanistan, and as a process of ethnic cleansing to reshape the narrative in alignment with Taliban values #ifph2024

Second presenter is Munazza Ebtikar, “Memory politics and memoricide in post-2021 Afghanistan” #ifph2024

And stops short of the restorative language that victims’ groups often call for, and therefore these apologies do not really represent transformative change, even when they are billed as such. #ifph2024

She argues that these apologies often simply reiterate the status quo of historical narratives, rather than disrupting those narratives to foreground the actual experiences of victims and the profound culpability of the gov’t and its agents. Language used is often pretty but vague #ifph2024

…without admitting to war crimes or other forms of violence that might have legal repercussions or jeopardize the view of Dutch military veterans who do not want to see themselves as perpetrators of war crimes (since war criminals are Nazis, etc) #ifph2024

de Vries discusses the tensions between the Dutch gov’t’s willingness to express remorse and concerns related to constituencies within the Netherlands. In the case of apologizing for colonial violence in Indonesia, she points out that the gov’t language is coded to acknowledge suffering… #ifph2024

Final session at #ifph2024! I haven’t been great about posting lol, but here we go. This panel is “Politics and public history: challenge and conflict.” First presenter is Renske de Vries, on public apologies from the Dutch government.

Finally, Irmgard Zündorf from the #ZZF introduces an online exhibition project on the history of the Bogensee- Buildings (from NS and GDR). So many layers of history to be de-constructed and the question: what is the best way to introduce this history to as many people possible? #ifph2024

And now Christine Szkiet introduces the Danioth Digital Experiment: take a look at Danioth-digital.ch #ifph2024

Stefan explains, how difficult it is to keep visitors on a website and interest them into exploring more: so a bottom „explore“ works better than a bottom „learn more“ - multimedia content like radio plays, motion comics, performances interested more people than giving „just“ texts… ifph2024

#ifph2024: Panel 18: Doing #online #exhibitions: Stefan Krebs introduces the #MinettStories, created in 2019/2021, you can still visit it online!

And the other two:
• Transformation: how the digital creates new realities
• From the shelf to the web, exploring historical newspapers in the digital age.
#ifph2024 Sofia encourages teachers in public history to use this OEC.

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2/2 Using #Wikipedia as an example of a self-regulated community with outreach and participatory characteristics
- Applying computational tools and techniques to Wikipedia data
- Studying history-making and public perceptions of the past on Wikipedia #ResearchPublicHistory
#ifph2024