International Educational Conference 2025 Post-conference publication | Page 11

Global Slavery book series, and he is area editor for the Journal of Global Slavery. He won the 2016 European History Quarterly Prize for an article on the origins of European investment.

Dr. Zofia Wóycicka is a historian by training. She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Warsaw, where she is currently leading a research project titled “Help Delivered to Jews during World War II and Transnational Memory in the Making.” Wóycicka

worked as an educator at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, as a curator at the House of European History in Brussels, and as a Researcher at the Centre for Historical Research in Berlin of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. She authored Arrested Mourning: Memory of the Nazi Camps in Poland, 1944-1950 among others.

The panel discussion started with an introduction by Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz, in which he stressed the different factors impacting the choices and, therefore, the integrity of the work of a historian, an educator, or a researcher. He pointed to the complex relationship between the duty and responsibility of a scholar to present valid interpretations and the expectations and pressure on the part of a given society, government, patron institutions, or funding bodies that can sway him towards specific narratives. He concluded that truth should guide historical research to promote understanding rather than perpetuating animosities.

Initially, the experts spoke about different understandings of bias in their fields of knowledge. Dr. Gamage stated that in Sri Lanka, significant bias is evident in primary sources like "the Great Chronicle", written by a Buddhist monk who primarily favors Buddhist kings, often overlooking the contributions of non-Buddhist rulers. Similarly, the Tamil community's high-caste Vellalar group dominates historical accounts, neglecting the contributions of suppressed castes, “because they are educated,” she explained, “and they had control over power.” Colonial perspectives further compound this issue, portraying colonial rulers as civilizers while disregarding local cultures. Dr. Gamage also stated that due to the current political agendas, historians “failed to critically analyze the real historical facts,” so many voices and events remained marginalized.

Photo: conference participants.