30, 31 JULY, 1 AUGUST 2015 at The Harrington Street Arts Centre, Kolkata
The international conference on history teaching across the subcontinent invites historians, activists, writers, teachers and artists to be a part of the start of a long-term project, which involves debate and discussion over turning our history classrooms into spaces for inquiry and analysis and inspiring students to engage in a deeper understanding that leads to multi perspectives.
The outcome of the conference will be a publication of conference papers and the development of a framework for long-term interaction between educators in the sub-continent.
Programme plan
Day 1: 30th July
[9.15 am] Welcome Address: Naveen Kishore, Managing Trustee, The Seagull Foundation for the Arts, Kolkata
[9.30am–10am] Key Note: Dr Barbara Christophe
Dr Christophe studied history and Slavonic studies and received her PhD from the University of Bremen in 1996 for a sociological study of current issues in Lithuania. She is the Head of the Memory Cultures Research Forum at the Georg Eckert Institute. She uses textbook research as an instrument in a wide range of projects reflecting a cultural studies-based approach but principally a practice-theoretical approach to research in memory practices. She is also involved in a comparative study exploring the debate surrounding memories of socialism through two different kinds of texts: history textbooks and biographical narratives of history teachers.
[10 am–11.15 am] Panel 1: Historical Interpretation
‘The Product of a Contemporary Ideology Across Nations with a Common Past’ in conversation with eminent historians and activists
Dr Vishwamohan Jha: Reconstruction of Communal Identities in the Historiography of Early India
‘The intellectual roots of communalism, especially but not only in history writing, often run deeper than is realized by the intellectuals opposing it.’
Dr Jha looks at the intimate link between the reconstruction of communal identities and the question of periodization of Indian history with reference to the changing perceptions of the relationship between popular and textbook histories vis-à-vis research by professional historians.
Dr Vishwamohan Jha specialises in Indian history. He has prepared textbook material for undergraduate and postgraduate levels at the School of Open Learning (formerly School of Correspondence Courses and Continuing Education), Delhi University, as well as Indira Gandhi National Open University. He has also been involved in preparation and evaluation of course material for National Council of Educational Research and Training, and National Institute of Open Schooling. He has written and delivered lectures extensively on textbook controversies. His publications include Investigative Journalism or Slander: Do You Have More Questions, Mr Shourie? and ‘A New Brand of History’ (Frontline, vol 20, Issues 4-5, 2003).
Dr Mubarak Ali [via Skype]: Pakistani Historiography
Immediately after the partition of the Indian subcontinent, the major task of the Pakistani historians was to justify its creation and determine their identity as an independent country. Dr Ali traces the 5 distinct phases of the historiography of Pakistan in less than 7 decades highlighting significant aspects and ideas reflected in the history textbooks.
Dr Ali did his MA in History from University of Sindh and his PhD from Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany. He was a professor in the Department of History, University of Sindh from 1985 to 1989. He worked as Resident Director of Goethe Institute Lahore from 1991 to 1995. Some of his books are The Court of the Great Mughals, Pakistan in Search of Ideology, Historian’s Dispute, In the Shadow of History and Essays on the History of Sindh. He also writes columns for the Daily Dawn.
Dr Ayaz Naseem [via Skype]: Role of Textbooks in Pakistan in Constructing the ‘Indian other’
In this presentation Dr Naseem examines how enemy images of India and Indians emerged and perpetuated through Pakistan’s educational discourse, especially the textbooks and curricula. He moves beyond the traditional explanations of hostility between the two countries to examine and analyse educational discourses (especially educational texts) in Pakistan as the site where India, its ideology and its population is constructed as the ‘other’.
Dr Ayaz Naseem holds a PhD in Comparative and International Education from McGill University, Canada. His research interests include peace education, social media, feminist theory and philosophy, post-structuralism, diversity in classroom, and democratic and citizenship education. Dr. Naseem is Associate Professor at the Department of Education, Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He also held the First Georg Arnhold Research Professorship on Educating for Sustainable Peace at the prestigious Georg Eckert Institute in Braunschweig, Germany in 2013–14. Dr Naseem’s writings have been published widely including 4 books and over fifty articles and book chapters. Three edited volumes are forthcoming in 2015–16. He has also taught in the departments of International Relations and Defense & Strategic Studies at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan.
Shreya Ghosh: Examining Narratives on South Asian Past in Textbooks of Bangladesh
‘Are textbooks like autobiographies of nations?’
Illustrating examples from textbooks of Bangladesh and India, Shreya looks at how same historical events, periods, or instances, are differently narrativized across two nationalist histories, producing different imaginations and associations about a South Asian past, thus, performing an important ideological function in nationalist historiography.
Shreya Ghosh is presently a doctoral candidate at Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She has previously worked as Research Fellow with Global India Foundation, a Kolkata based research organization, where she worked on school textbooks of Bangladesh and nationalist historiography in South Asia. She has a Masters degree in International Relations from Jadavpur University, Kolkata and an MPhil from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Parts of her research paper entitled ‘Identity Construction through Textual Representations: A Study of Narratives in Bangladesh School Textbooks’has been presented at the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research.
Discussion chaired by Dr Garga Chatterjee, Kolkata-based commentator on South Asian politics and culture. He received his PhD from Harvard University and is a faculty member at the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.
[11.15am–11.30am] Coffee break
[11.30am–1.30pm] Panel 2: Historiography and the Classroom
- A Discussion on Curriculum, Politicisation, Reforms
- History as Peace Education
Prof Anil Sethi: Salient Features of the Current History Textbooks of the N.C.E.R.T.
Prof Sethi will focus on some of the salient features of current History textbooks of NCERT, the kinds of history included in these books, what light the books shed on the nature and method of the discipline, and the constructivist pedagogy they hope to promote. He will speak about the current history curriculum of the C.B.S.E. affiliated schools and also about some of the principles the NCERT follows in developing these textbooks. A chapter on the Partition of British India featured in Themes in Indian History Part III (Delhi, NCERT, 2007), the history textbook for Class XII will be used to illustrate his statements.
Prof Anil Sethi is Professor of History and History Education at the Azim Premji University, Bangalore and was earlier Professor of History at the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), New Delhi. He has taught at various universities; Delhi University, Osaka University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, University of North London, and as Visiting Professor at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. His interests include the social and religious history of modern South Asia, the history of the Indian National Movement, and Social Science Education. Prof Sethi has helped develop various history textbooks published by NCERT. He has written for the current textbooks of history for Classes VIII, XI and XII of the NCERT. His publications include School, Society, Nation: Popular Essays in Education that he co-edited with Rajni Kumar and Shalini Sikka.
Dr Arjun Dev: History Textbooks and the Indian State
Dr Dev in his presentation will take us through the various stages that the history curriculum in India has been through since independence. From the colonial historiography after independence to the 1968 policy-curriculum and syllabi, the role of NCERT, the first time use of state power for communalisation of education, the national curriculum, the New National Curriculum Framework2005; to the present day—Dr Dev will talk about the impact of the post independence developments and changes in history education in India.
Dr Arjun Dev was the Head of NCERT’s erstwhile Department of Education in Social Sciences and Humanities from 1992 till his retirement in 2000. His main areas of work in the NCERT has been related to curriculum development and preparation of instructional materials in-service training of teachers and teacher-educators etc., primarily of History. He was the author/joint author of NCERT’s history textbooks entitled Modern India (for Class VIII), The Story of Civilization, Parts one and two (for Classes IXand X) and Contemporary World History (for Class XII) which were prescribed or recommended reading for CBSE-affiliated schools and some others. He was Member Secretary of the National Steering Committee on Textbook Evaluation, and has worked against the communalisation of textbooks.
Prof Afsan Chowdhury: Teaching History without Political Borders
Prof Chowdhury examines the components of an inclusive history approach vis-à-vis an exclusivist history where the vision is primarily political. He will discuss how looking at our past from many angles—social, political, religious, economic etc.—leads to development of social values. Working on methodology that is more causal than ideological, Prof Chowdhury explains how inclusive history shifts from traditional sources to oral traditions in order to map social behavior.
Prof Afsan Chowdhury is currently Senior Advisor (Advocacy and Communication) and Adjunct Faculty at the BRAC University in Dhaka, Bangladesh. His current research projects include A History of Villages during Conflict, The Case of the 1971 War and Social and Communal Discrimination Analysis in Selected Sylhet Areas. A former Oak Fellow for International Human Rights, Prof Chowdhury has been a consultant with the United Nations. His publications include Bangladesh 1971: History of Bangladesh Independence War (4 volumes) and People Movements, Human Rights and Bangladesh: Kansat and Phulbari (Research Project University of Penang).
Joining the conversation:
Dr Ali Raza, Jinnah Institute
Dr Raza is an Assistant Professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He obtained his DPhil in Modern South Asian History from the University of Oxford. His research and teaching interests pertains to the intellectual, social, and political history of modern South Asia. He has authored a number of articles on leftist movements in British India and is the co-editor of The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds and World Views 1919–1939.
Swaleha Alam Shahzada, Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP)
Swaleha graduated in Finance from the Greenwich University and worked in the financial sector after which she pursued a career in education. She taught economics, business and accounting for more than 15 years. Swaleha then went on to head a private school in Karachi before becoming CAP’s Executive Director in June 2012.
Dr Shubra Chatterji, Vikramshila Education Resource Society
Vikramshila Education Resource Society started its journey in 1989 in an attempt to make quality education a reality for all children. Based in Kolkata, Vikramshila reaches out to underprivileged and under-resourced sections of society to make education meaningful and relevant in their lives. Over the last 20 years, it has undertaken various initiatives in action research and teacher-development programmes all over India, reaching out to more than 200 grassroots level organisations 25,000 teachers and 14,00,000 children.
Discussion chaired by Mrs Devi Kar, Director of Modern High School for Girls and President of The Teachers’ Centre, Kolkata.
[1.30pm–2.25pm] Lunch
[2.30pm–4.15pm] The effect of interpretations of history on mindsets
The Context in Practise: A Workshop with Teachers using the World Café Methodology
When accounts of history textbooks taught in classrooms across countries show an inherent bias, one that carries on from events which occurred many decades ago, it is natural to question the effect it has on shaping minds.
Does this bias come across in the way we teach history? How does one moderate what is given in the textbooks and allow students to discover history by themselves? Have students rejected what is being taught to them, or have they accepted the words in the textbook as a universal truth? Are students at all affected by what is taught in class and if yes, when and how do these influences manifest themselves? This session will focus on discussions stemming from the panels discussions and will include other topics such as:
- Communalism in the text: Does it translate into communalism in children?
- How do classroom practices affect mindsets in adolescents?
- Changing those I educate: Affecting mindsets in the primary school
- Do history textbooks contribute towards sowing the seed of bias?
- A common history textbook for the sub-continent?
- Bias: What is a teacher’s role?
- How do history and teaching history shape identities and the notion of tolerance?
- Should partition be included in syllabus?
[4.15pm-4.30pm] Coffee break
[4.30pm–6pm] Workshop: How is History Done? A Model for Teachers and Learners
Prof Anil Sethi, Professor, History and History Education, Azim Premji University
This interaction will focus on the interplay between pedagogy and the nature, and method of the discipline of history. If teachers have to be imaginative and effective in their teaching, they must understand the nature and method of the discipline. How do historians construct history? Are there any distinctions between the past and history? What is meant by doing history? Historians create explanations, arguments and narratives on the basis of reasoning, facts and evidence. What is the nature and method of these explanations? What are the key elements we must know about facts, evidence, reasoning and ‘story-telling’ in order to effectively teach history? The interaction will also invite teachers to think about the relationship between historical explanations and perspective and to distinguish perspective from prejudice. It will help them think through the notions of ‘concept’ and ‘category’ as used by historians and history teachers.
Day 2: 31st July
[9.30am- 10am] Key Note: Mrs Devi Kar
Mrs Kar has been in the field of school education for over 40 years. She has taught briefly in Singapore and visited educational institutions in UK, USA, Canada and Germany. Mrs Kar has authored history textbooks published by OUP and Orient Longman (now Orient Blackswan) and written on issues related to education in newspapers and journals. At present she is the Director of Modern High School for Girls, and the Modern Academy Of Continuing Education (MACE); the President of The Teachers’ Centre, Kolkata; Member of the Advisory Committee of Patha Bhavan, Visva Bharati;Member of the Education Sub-committee, Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Eastern Region.
[10am–1pm] Teaching contentious history: case studies from around the world
[10am–10.50am] Franco German common History textbook/Israel Palestine common History textbook/German Polish common History textbook
The Franco German, the German Polish, and the Israel Palestine common history text books, revolutionary in more ways than one, were developed using the ‘dual narrative approach’ to address the need for having a textbook that would overcome divergent narratives of history.
These projects will be presented and discussed by Dr BARBARA Christophe, Head, Memory Cultures Research Forum, Georg Eckert Institute.
[11am-11.15am] Coffee break
[11.15am–12.10pm] The History Project [Pakistan]
‘History doesn’t only narrate genocides, it can create them’
In this presentation Qasim Aslam and Spruha Mehta highlight the role of history education (specifically school textbooks) in shaping the ideological fabric of our present and the future and the need for innovation in the way history is taught. They will present The History Project as ed-innovation in the discipline of history that juxtaposes contrarian narratives in textbook history to gain an impartial understanding of historical events.
Qasim Aslam is the co-founder of The History Project Society, an initiative that aims to innovate the way history is taught by highlighting the biases inculcated through partial narratives in textbooks, which breed a specific brand of patriotism. Qasim is Laureate Global Fellow (2014) with the Sylvan Laureate Foundation, and a member of the British Council’s Global Changemakers. He has been working on international peace initiatives with Seeds of Peace for the past 14 years, and is currently serving on the board of their local chapter in Pakistan.
Spruha Mehta has been a part of Seeds of Peace since 2006 and has helped organise a variety of Indo-Pak educational and cultural exchange programs. A corporate banker by profession, Spruha is serving as the focal point of the India chapter of The History Project (THP) with primary focus on managing local partnerships with schools and educators training with THP materials.
[12.15pm–1.15pm] Teaching Divided Histories
Teaching Divided Histories is an innovative project developed by Nerve-Centre [Derry-Londonderry] and funded by the European Regional Development Fund under the Peace III programme—a new curriculum-linked approach that explores the potential of Digital Media for in-school learning practices. The key aim of this project is to demonstrate how teachers can use moving images and creative technologies to engage pupils in the study of conflict and offer them stimulating ways of questioning attitudes and challenging sectarian stereotypes.
PeaceWorks, appointed the international partner in India for the Teaching Divided Histories project has developed a supplementary curriculum module that is relevant to classrooms and syllabus in the Indian context. This module is being followed in schools in India and Pakistan.
Meena Megha Malhotra will introduce the project. Teachers who have implemented this project will then showcase the work done by their students.
Sunita Biswas, Modern High School, Kolkata
Tina Servaia, Calcutta International School, Kolkata.
Faiza Kasim, Karachi High School, Karachi.
[1.15pm–2pm] Lunch
[2pm–5pm] The alternative approach
[2pm–3pm] The Krishnamurti Foundation Approach
Mrs Amita Prasad, Vice Principal, Modern High School for Girls, in conversation with educators from Rishi Valley School and The School, Chennai
The Historian, the Philosopher and the Self
Devika Govindachari’s talk will explore in broad terms how the teaching history at the ISC level is informed by Krishnamurti’s philosophy and concern for humanity and how the professional historian’s craft (of reconstructing and understanding the past through reliable evidence, rational interpretation and causal explanation) and Krishnamurti’s intentions for the young converge. Both aim at producing critical, analytical citizens who are at the same time concerned about their fellow human beings and the physical and natural world around them. The presentation will demonstrate this line of thought with examples from classroom pedagogy of select historical events.
Devika has read History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, University of Pennsylvania and Syracuse University. Her research interests have been in the intellectual and social history of modern India. She has taught at the undergraduate level in both United States and India and has been teaching history at Krishnamurti schools for 13 years.
Teaching History through Trips
Akhila Seshadri’s talk will focus on how students can learn history through trips. She will speak about how they have used each of the school trips as modes of learning. They will illustrate the learning intent, the modalities (through directed worksheets, prior planning and inputs) and the actual experience of the trip. The trip of the year at The School is a history trip that aims at observing, questioning and inferring with careful regard to what they have read as background reading as well as to what they are actually seeing. So, the student of history becomes a student-historian.
Akhila has always had a deep and abiding interest in the humanities. This has been further strengthened both by her training in history as well as my experiences at The School (KFI), where she have been a teacher for the past 25 years.
Krishna Menon will talk about the history curriculum in Rishi Valley School which is framed with the values, intellectual and aesthetic, embedded in the philosophy of the founder J. Krishnamurti. These include the unity of humankind, and concern for species that share the Earth with human beings. These values are brought together to create a rational relationship to the past, and presented as a backdrop to the understanding of contemporary global realities. The school’s setting in a valley whose inhabitants are farmers, shepherds and stonecutters focuses urban students’ attention on ancient livelihoods and the social formations in which they are embedded.
Krishna is a teacher at the Rishi Valley School. He has been teaching the ICSE and ISC syllabi for the last 13 years at the secondary school level. He has been dealing, largely, with modern European history.
[3.10pm–4.10pm] Film and Young Minds – Amar Kanwar, filmmaker and artist
Amar Kanwar’s films, installations and exhibitions are complex, contemporary narratives that connect intimate personal spheres of existence to larger social processes. Emerging from the subcontinent, and addressing several issues like the partition of India, communal, caste and political violence, sexuality, agriculture and ecology, Kanwar’s works have mapped a long journey of exploration with the politics of power and justice. His films A Season Outside, A Night of Prophecy, The Lightning Testimonies, and The Sovereign Forest present multiple vocabularies of seeing and comprehending history and have connected with diverse audiences in educational institutions, social campaigns, exhibitions and museums across the world.
[4.10pm–4.30pm] Coffee break
[4.30pm–5.15pm] PERFORMANCE:Dear Earth…Hope you are keeping well! Presented by Chaepani
The play develops in the form of a dialogue between Rabindranath Tagore’s short story Kabuliwalah (1892), Zaheda Hina’s fictitious letter Kumkum Theek-Thak Hain (2008) and poems written as modes of resistance by detainees in the prisons of Guantanamo Bay.
Tagore’s story cherishes the friendship that grows between a five–year old Mini and a hawker from Afghanistan, an apprehended outsider in 19th century Bengal. Zaheda Hina’s narrative traverses several borders—geo-political and psychological—as Kumkum writes to Mini, her 75-year-old grandmother, from contemporary devastated Kabul that was once a vibrant land of her tales. We journey across deeply embedded borders of narrow nationalisms in South Asia, of cultural xenophobia and religious fundamentalism through bridges of shared history and cultural traditions of the subcontinent. This presentation attempts to question the claims of a borderless globalized world promoted by dominant cultural politics while steeper structures of fundamentalism fracture the world.
Day 3: 1st August
[10am–10.30am] Key Note: Urvashi Butalia
Urvashi Butalia co-founded Kali for Women in 1984 and in 2003 founded Zubaan. With over 35 years of experience in feminist and independent publishing, she has a formidable reputation in the industry in India and abroad. She also has a long involvement in the women’s movement in India, and is a well-known writer, both in academia and in the literary world. She has several works to her credit, key among which is her path-breaking study of Partition, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India which won the Oral History Book Association Award and the Nikkei Asia Award for Culture. She has also taught publishing for over 20 years and is on the advisory boards of a number of national and international organisations. She has received many awards, among which are the Pandora award for women’s publishing, the French Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres, the Nikkei Asia Award for Culture and the Padma Shree, the highest civilian honour awarded by the Indian government.
[10.30am–12.30am] Moving Beyond Traditional Sources: Presentations on oral histories and how it can be used in the classroom
[10.30am–11.10am] Oral Histories: Cultural and Historical Preservation through Oral Storytelling
The Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP) is a non-profit organization dedicated to cultural and historic preservation. CAP focuses its attention on the tradition of oral storytelling in Pakistan, emphasizing the importance of such narratives in a dialogue on national identity. In her presentation Swaleha will talk about their school and college outreach program and how CAP has used its archives to develop an alternative history curriculum.
Swaleha Alam Shahzada has been involved with CAP since May 2008. She launched CAP’s flagship program The Oral History Project in June 2008.
[11.10am–11.20am] Coffee break
[11.20am–12pm] The Partition(s) Within and Without
‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’
Aditi Banerjee will share glimpses of the work she has done in the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and technology in dealing with personal and collective memory with respect to the Partition and the 1984 riots in Punjab. The presentation will seek to give a sense of the process and the pieces that were produced. The approach was to look at personal histories and experience as an artist, to seek evocation and empathy rather than information.
Aditi has a Bachelors degree in Literature from St. Stephen’s College, an MA in Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and a Diploma in Film and Video Communication from National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. At Srishti she has worked on projects that focus on harsh social realities and trauma of the partition of India, 1984 riots, displacement of indigenous communities in Kutch, and other issues. She approaches these subjects through artistic interventions, along with the students, as the learning becomes real through experience.
[12pm–12.30pm] Oral History / Documented History
Tina Servaia, Faculty Member, History Department, Calcutta International School, in conversation with Swaleha Alam Shahzada and Aditi Banerjee.
[12.30 pm–1.30 pm] LUNCH
[1.45 pm–5 pm with a 15 minute coffee break] Workshops
The Role of Literature as An Alternative Narrative – Anjum Katyal, Prof Kavita Panjabi
This workshop will examine literature as an alternative, as well as a critical component of historical narrative and the role it plays in the classroom.
Prof Kavita Panjabi specialises in oral narratives, testimonial literature, and contemporary Indian literature. She holds a PhD from Cornell University. Amongst her publications are a book entitled Old Maps and New: Legacies of the Partition, an edited volume Nostalgia for the Future in Latin American Literatures, and essays on violence against women, communalism and gender in Gujarat, testimonial literature, oral narratives of women in the Tebhaga movement, and Latin American literatures.
Anjum Katyal has been Chief Editor at Seagull books for many years, and is currently a consultant with the Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute for Asian Studies (MAKAIS), Kolkata. She has written extensively on theatre and the arts. She has also conducted workshops for educators, as well as school and college students.
Storyfying the Curriculum – Deeptha Vivekanand, Nisha Abdulla
This session will focus on how educators can engage with their students to create learning experiences by harnessing the power of narrative while teaching history. Practical examples of story-based teaching that draws from both traditional and modern forms of storytelling will be shared. Ideas and tips on how to effectively include stories in lesson plans will be discussed, which may help learners to grow critical thinking, develop a spirit of inquiry and gain a different perspective on the importance of learning about our shared past.
Deeptha Vivekanand has been a professional storyteller and story-educator for the last 6 years. She is the founder of Ever After Learning, which is focussed on promoting the use of narratives that aid learning for both young people and adults. She conducts workshops and performances to encourage educators, teachers, corporate managers and parents alike to actively include storytelling as an interactive method which makes the learning environment creative and personal.
Nisha Abdulla is the co-founder of Ever After Learning and a professional storyteller. She is also a writer and a theatre practitioner. She enjoys writing and performing stories with strong messages about appreciating the environment, diversity and inclusion. At Ever After, she specialises in crafting original stories that can be used in the curriculum. She focusses on storifying the social studies curriculum and facilitating story based learning sessions for grades 6th–9th for Amaatra Academy, Bangalore.
Photography and History – Alisha Sett, Nathaniel Brunt
This workshop will focus on simple photographic exercises which teachers can use in the classroom to engage students with an interactive method of studying history. Using the archives of Kashmir Photo Collective as a starting point, Alisha Sett and Nathanial Brunt will illustrate the power of photography to engage young minds that are embedded in visual culture. They will guide teachers through the digital resources available to them in order to make photography an accessible and enjoyable part of curriculum.
Alisha Settis a writer based in Mumbai. In 2013, Sett was awarded an Edmond J. Safra Network Fellowship from the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University for her project based in Kashmir. She has a BA in Political Science and English from Tufts University (USA) where she was also a student of the Program for Narrative and Documentary Practice.
Nathaniel Brunt is a Canadian documentarian, digital content strategist and educator based in Toronto. His work focuses on the aftermath of conflict, trauma and the social and political problems that arise during this period. Brunt has worked in former Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe, South Asia and Southeast Asia. He has graduated from Ryerson University’s Arts and Contemporary Studies program and the University of Kent’s War, Media and Society program. Nathaniel is currently pursuing the Photographic Preservation and Collections Management Program at Ryerson University where he is a special program instructor. His work has been published and exhibited internationally.
Contemporary History and the Classroom – Abeer Gupta
This workshop will elaborate on working with contemporary history along three axes—tourism, working with museums and anthropological research. It will focus on design of heritage walks and craft tours, curating exhibitions of photographic archives and oral history documentation with examples from Abeer’s projects.
Abeer currently works as an Assistant Professor, at the School of Design, at Ambedkar University, Delhi. He graduated from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad in Communication Design, and holds a Masters degree in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths College, London. He has worked as an executive producer of feature and director of documentary films, and participated in various public art and community media projects. His research focuses on oral histories, material cultures and visual archives of the western Himalayas, Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir.
Concluding Remarks: Meena Megha Malhotra, Director, PeaceWorks, The Seagull Foundation for the Arts, Kolkata
Introduction to ‘Remembrance as a Tool of Peace and Understanding’
An upcoming conference organised byGoethe Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata and Goethe Institut, Dhaka by Friso Maecker, Director, Goethe Institut and Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata.