WRIT 241 - Politics of Public Memory

Students understand and examine questions related to memory and public memory, their differences, and how the influences of public memory shape our contemporary understanding of society. Students engage with the processes through which memory becomes public and is shaped by the conditions of the everyday. Furthermore, students come to understand the intricate relationship between the past and present and how they influence each other. While students are introduced to foundational concepts related to public memory in rhetorical studies, they are simultaneously encouraged to think beyond the frameworks of memory as simply emerging from Greco-Roman-Western traditions. Memory is understood from a postcolonial/decolonial/anticolonial perspective to further comprehend the politics of public memory. Students learn how to consider memory as not simply evoked or codified in memorials, monuments, and museums. In order to do that, students visit a museum where they have an opportunity to engage with artifacts–more importantly with their historical and cultural context–and reflect on how memory is often relegated to artifacts that are collected and stored in a museum setting. Students think about the connections between public memory and trauma, archival practices, oral history, cultural heritage, and digital lives. Ultimately students collectively reflect on how meanings can be stabilized and destabilized through the circulation of public memory depending upon the social, cultural, and political conditions of the time.

Credits: 1.0
Corequisite: None
Prerequisites: None
Major/Minor Restrictions: None
Class Restriction: None
Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression
Core Component: None

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