Troubled pasts, and their implicati… – Information Centre – Research & Innovation

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The EU-funded REPAST challenge is exploring how societies deal with the extensive shadow of previous conflicts, in a bid to generate insights and present information for policymakers and civil modern society. Case research are remaining executed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Kosovo, Ireland, Poland and Spain.

‘We want to realize what areas of several tough legacies reside on in a problematic manner these days and develop obstructions to the integration and relations of the several populations in Europe,’ states challenge coordinator Dimitra Milioni of the Cyprus College of Technological know-how. ‘To do so, we are investigating how conflict discourses are remaining formulated and disseminated in the community sphere.’

As of March 2020, the project’s broad details-collection exercising has been completed, and the researchers have started to method the intensive materials they have collected. The will cause and traits of individual conflicts may possibly vary, but the researchers however expect to discover commonalities in the dealing with of painful and likely contested collective recollections, Milioni clarifies.

Illuminating record

‘Our goal is to get there at some form of typology of troubled previous discourses these days,’ she states. ‘We’re analysing how folks in several cultures and nations came to try to remember the sources of these conflicts and how they negotiate and hopefully renegotiate the initial triggers. And we also want to see how all this is connected to Europe these days, and European integration.’

Northern Ireland, for occasion, is 1 territory in which the previous is hardly ever significantly absent.

‘There’s a regular undercurrent of tension, in particular around controversial troubles,’ Milioni clarifies. ‘It is an case in point of how even a settled troubled previous can re-emerge and could likely also be revived, in particular through political discourse, from time to time through media discourse, but also through community discourse.’ In REPAST’s other case research nations, the condition is related.

The project’s details collection considered 4 areas of expression: politics, record – both equally oral and formal – and the media, as well as art and lifestyle. It integrated pursuits as diverse as interviewing locals about their own recollections of previous functions or about the recollections that had been handed on to them by elders, exploring conventional and citizen media, scouring social gathering manifestos and viewing stage performances.

‘In Cyprus, for occasion, we found out that several artists are performing with political dance, which is not broadly recognised,’ she states. ‘We noticed how this form of creative exercise truly makes an attempt to recreate the previous, and likely also troubles hegemonic representations of this previous.’

Speedy ahead

The emphasis in the challenge, which is thanks to stop in April 2021, will now change from details collection to details examination, and to the output of sources and tips for policymakers – both equally in the REPAST case research nations and at EU stage – and civil modern society organisations this kind of as non-governmental organisations invested in peacebuilding.

Other goal audiences in areas with a bitter legacy involve vacationer guides, for whom REPAST intends to organise seminars and deliver e-finding out materials. A details platform will enable anybody with an desire to check out, evaluate and distinction information and facts collected by the challenge and access its several other outputs, Milioni notes. The companions are also preparing to formulate methodology to aid foreseeable future exploration in the field.

A person device beneath progress is an on line game that fosters players’ potential to assess historic information and facts. Quite a few adaptations of the game, which is principally supposed for schoolchildren, will be created to accommodate various ages and countrywide contexts.

‘REPAST strives to convey the plan that record as taught in colleges, for case in point, or as introduced in community discourse, is generally produced,’ Milioni emphasises. ‘As citizens, we need to just take a phase back again, we need to develop the techniques to realize that what is remaining projected corresponds to a unique position of check out, to a unique entry position.’