we live in”, such as family, peer groups, or professional environments. Our memory is activated and interpreted in various contexts, influencing our perception of memory and our individual memory. “In psychology nowadays we also include collective future thinking, so how we imagine the future of our group in 10 years,” added Dr. Nawël Cheriet. Speaking from the position of a practitioner, not a scholar, Miško Stanišić used the example of Wojwodina in Serbia to point to the idea of inclusive memory, “going from the local micro-historical approach and trying to find space to reflect on what really matters to people on the local level.”
Could you share your experience with working with different types of memory? Could you describe the context of your work and share with us particular issues you are trying to tackle during your work as academics and also as educators?
Dr. Cheriet, working as a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Liège and UCLouvain, focuses on two cases: the French-Algerian postcolonial memory and the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, studying “how those collective memories are included, stocked, and how we remember them, how the social context influences what we remember at that time.”
Dr. Tartakowsky researched the literary works of Jews from Magreb that emigrated to France in the 1960s, focusing on how literature can contribute to the collective memory constructions. Another project was how the history of Jews had been taught in Polish schools since 1989. Here, Dr. Tartakowsky spoke of the real and hidden curricula, i.e., what was taught versus how it was appropriated by the students, arguing that one shared collective memory is hardly possible; however, it is possible to teach and learn to “connect to other experience”.
The expertise of Stanišić is connected to education, primarily developing educational methodologies and materials to deal with the history of the Holocaust and related topics.