- Department: History
- Credit value: 20 credits
- Credit level: M
- Academic year of delivery: 2024-25
- See module specification for other years: 2022-23
The past has passed, but leaving it behind is another matter. Violences and injustices perpetrated at specific moments in history linger or resurface, generating often politically contentious demands for justice, reparation, apology, acknowledgement, atonement or reconciliation. Over the period since the middle of the twentieth century, and increasingly in recent decades, demands of this kind – rooted in varied experiences of war, racism, colonialism, imperialism, state terror, genocide, displacement and dispossession – have been a salient, though often a controversial feature of the political landscape, both within particular nations and internationally. Drawing on a range of examples from different countries and global regions, this module will explore the political, ethical, conceptual and legal issues raised by such demands and by the resistances they encounter, and will use these as a prism through which to investigate cultural assumptions about collective guilt and responsibility, social trauma, the ethics of witnessing and remembrance, identity politics, symbolic action and other themes. Detailed case studies will be combined with general conceptual analysis.
The module draws on approaches in politics, sociology, law, philosophy and cultural studies as well as history, but it also seeks specifically to explore the historical conditions under which movements for reparation, apology or retrospective justice have emerged, and the ways in which history as a discipline, and historians as its practitioners, are implicated in these debates, whether through the role of historians as advisers, commentators or witnesses in particular cases, or through the more general notion that historical writing and research itself may serve as a vehicle of justice or reparation or as a means of sustaining recognition of past atrocities.
Occurrence | Teaching period |
---|---|
A | Semester 2 2024-25 |
The aims of this module are to:
Students who complete this module successfully will:
Students will attend a 1-hour briefing in week 1. Students will then attend a 2-hour seminar in weeks 2-4, 6-8 and 10-11. Weeks 5 & 9 are Reading and Writing (RAW) weeks during which there are no seminars, and during which students research and write a formative essay, consulting with the module tutor. Students prepare for eight seminars in all.
Seminar topics are subject to variation, but are likely to include the following:
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Essay/coursework | 100 |
None
Students submit a 2,000-word formative essay in week 9.
A 4,000-word summative essay will be due in the assessment period.
Task | % of module mark |
---|---|
Essay/coursework | 100 |
Students will typically receive written feedback on their formative essay within 10 working days of submission.
Work will be returned to students in their seminars and may be supplemented by the tutor giving some oral feedback to the whole group. All students are encouraged, if they wish, to discuss the feedback on their formative essay during their tutor’s student hours—especially during week 11, before, that is, they finalise their plans for the Summative Essay.
For more information, see the Statement on Feedback.
For the summative assessment task, students will receive their provisional mark and written feedback within 25 working days of the submission deadline. The tutor will then be available during student hours for follow-up guidance if required. For more information, see the Statement of Assessment.
For reading during the module, please refer to the module VLE site. Before the course starts, we encourage you to look at the following items of preliminary reading: