Education in Cultures of Redress – Seminar 22 May

​​11am, 22nd May, Centre for Contemporary Histories, Deakin University
In-person and online
https://cch.deakin.edu.au/news/2024/04/cch-seminar-22nd-may-mati-keynes/

This paper examines the place of education within cultures of redress. Educational reforms are one of many discursive mechanisms of the political terrain of redress. Specifically, I canvass four recent cases—Australia, Canada, Northern Ireland and South Africa—where education reform has been used as a mechanism for righting historical wrongs. I compare examples of policy, curriculum, textbook, and pedagogical reform, and their surrounding debates, as they have been directed to redress the past and support social change. I am interested broadly in how knowledge of historical injustice has been mediated through education in established democracies, including how understandings of history figure in changing modes of liberal self-understanding and citizen-formation.

The period from the late-1980s to the present has been attributed many monikers—age of apology, politics of regret, the guilted age—each in their own way seeks to capture something of the ‘essence’ of a preoccupation with the past as a defining feature of global politics. There have been more than 40 truth commissions and 340 political apologies globally in that period. Redress has not been limited to post-conflict societies emerging from civil strife. It is also favoured in established democracies founded on large-scale abuses or characterised by colonial injustice.

All welcome!