Keynote lecture
Auschwitz and other memorial sites from the perspective of sociological research
Lecturers:
-Prof. Marek Kucia, ICEAH Council, Sociology Institute at the Jagiellonian University
-Dr. Katarzyna Stec, Sociology Institute at the Jagiellonian University
This lecture outlined the work achieved by Dr. Katarzyna Stec over the last couple of decades, who compared and studied different sociological research, published from the end of the 90s to the present day, about education in authentic memorial sites. The focus of the study has been on young Polish visitors (students, pupils, tourists) taking part in educational activities about the Holocaust. Throughout her work, she has been supervised by Prof. Marek Kucia.
To analyze the sociological studies, she focused on the following questions: Who did the research and when? Who was studied and what questions were asked? What findings were made? How was the research carried out?
Then three different contexts were selected to be studied:
-Students visiting a memorial site as part of a school outing
-Students visiting without their school group, but taking part in a workshop or museum lesson
-Students who received formal education about the Holocaust at school
In their own studies, researchers worked on various topics such as the perception of memorial sites and museums; the effectiveness of educational programs in terms of the knowledge obtained by participants; and the attitudes and values shaped by these projects, both in memorial sites and at school.
Some researchers took a closer look at specific subjects, such as Michał Bilewicz, who recently studied if visitors to memorial sites showed any symptoms of secondary trauma as part of post-secondary stress disorder caused by a visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site. Grzegorz Żuk investigated a specific question while studying the reflections and opinions of young people after a standard visit and after a museum lesson: Can the same historical material lead to differentiated reflections depending on the gender of the participant?
work on. In the second half, she draw conclusions and gave the audience the results of these studies. She undertook to answer the following questions: What results and conclusions can be drawn from these studies? Are these conclusions coherent between different studies? Should they be explored further?