What's taught at our summer school (2014)

In 2014, the summer school was conducted at the Fakultas Ilmu Budaya (Faculty of Cultural Knowledge) of Universitas Gadjah Mada.

UGM local organiser Widaratih Kamiso

and HU lecturer Dr. Olivia Killias

Photo (c) Lye Tuck-Po

The first week of the summer school was lecture-driven. These lectures illustrated important sources of meaning and various ways of forming social memory and prepared the students for their field research projects in the second week.

The five days of classes covered the following topics:

• "Memory and the national canon of Indonesian historiography" by Prof. Dr. Bambang Purwanto (UGM); deconstruction of nationalist historiography.

• "Memory, memory making and heritage: Some fundamental considerations" by Prof. Dr. Vincent Houben (HU); introduction to the central concepts and theories important to memory studies.

• “Legitimacy, lost heroes, and memory,” Dr. Soon Chuan Yean (USM): emerging politics in the Philippines; memory repackaged; memory ruptured; memory sustained.

• “Other ways of remembering” by Dr. Lye Tuck-Po (USM): bodily practices; landscape as a source of meaning, social memory based on experience; differences with inscribed memory

• “The battle goes on: debates on (negative) memory in post-authoritarian and post-colonial societies” by Joszef Berta (HU guest lecturer): transnational genealogies of negative memory; Indonesia and Germany compared; roles of victims and rehabilitation

• “Memory, monument and national hero” by Dr. Sri Margana (UGM): memory contestation; construction and deconstruction of monuments; competition between government, local populations, people from Bali

• “The resonance of silence: Remembering Indië in the post-colonial Netherlands” by Dr. Olivia Killias (HU): remembrance of the Indies in Holland; collective amnesia; absence of a postcolonial debate; decolonisation by means of the culturalisation of memory; subaltern memories; diversity in memory of communities

• “The uses and abuses of memory” by Dr. Budiawan (UGM): comparison between Cambodia, Singapore, and Indonesia; empty signifiers; move beyond discourse of innocence and victimhood

• “Memory, violence and emotions” by Rosa Castillo (HU): subaltern formats of memory making; social memory of violence; role of emotions; context in memory making
• "Philosphical and practical considerations in field research", by Aleah Connley (HU), Rosa Castillo (HU), and Uji Nugroho (UGM).

Uji Nugroho (UGM) lecturing on methodology
Photo (c) Lye Tuck-Po

(extracted from the summer school Final Report and Prof. Houben's summing-up notes)