HFKK00031U Interdisciplinary Issues in Asian Studies: Culture, Memory and Reconciliation after Mass Atrocities: Case-Studies from East Asia, South Asia and Southeast Asia

This course will stipulate the key importance of memory for the constitution of society and projection of the future for a whole people. Students will study how the memory of violence continues to traumatize people today and how it is difficult and often dangerous to talk about the truth in public space. This course then argues that it is pertinent to study the past to understand the present. The course will introduce the multifarious ways in which violent pasts continue to shape the political debates and conflicts of the present, in Cambodia, Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, China etc. with a long historical breath, this course will look into contemporary struggles to come to terms with a violent past and study how the non-solvation of critical events in the past continues to trouble the planning of the future. The students also learn how to apply theoretical concepts and methodological tools to explain the phenomenon of trauma, memory and reconciliation and their interfaces and to validate academic debates on transitional justice and the documentation of mass atrocities, humiliation and genocide in those cases.