GHIL Lecture

Eleni Christodoulou and Neeladri Bhattacharya

Who Owns Public History?

Two Talks on History Textbooks in Conflicted Societies

Contested Histories Seminar Series

18 June 2019

(1:44 h)

GHIL Lecture

Eleni Christodoulou and Neeladri Bhattacharya

Who Owns Public History?
Two Talks on History Textbooks in Conflicted Societies

Who owns public history and on what grounds? How does the historian relate to public debates? Across spatial and temporal conflict contexts, debates about the content and role of history textbooks are sensitive, highly political, and often notable for their interminability.

Developing a theoretical approach, political scientist Eleni Christodoulou, Georg Eckert Institute, Braunschweig, will embrace ‘educational anxieties’ by offering a frame-work for analysing securitization dynamics that success-fully resist and prevent textbook revisions as part of peace-building processes in Cyprus and Lebanon.

Neeladri Bhattacharya, former Chief Adviser of the National Council for Education Research and Training in India, will then explore how contested claims of caste, class, region, and nation, play out on the site of history textbooks in India.

Chaired by Nandini Manjrekar, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

The second part of the Contested Histories Seminar Series (11 June 2019):

Avril Alba, Yasmin Khan, and Tom Lawson: Multidirectional Memory? National Holocaust Memorials and (Post-)Colonial Legacies

was held at UCL and can be found here on the UCL Arts and Social Science Soundcloud (1:18 h)