Today marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This annual date serves not only as an official commemoration of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and the millions of other victims of Nazism, but to promote Holocaust education throughout the world.
For more than a decade, UVic has played a leading role in Holocaust studies. Home to the I-witness Holocaust Field School (the first of its kind for undergraduate students at a Canadian university when it launched in 2010), the Faculty of Humanities also offers a master’s stream in Holocaust studies (the only one of its kind in Canada).
In the ongoing SSHRC-funded work led by UVic Professor of Germanic and Slavic Studies Charlotte Schallié, our Head of Advanced Research Services, Matt Huculak, is part of an international team of researchers for the Narrative Art & Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education interdisciplinary project. As stated on their website, their mission is a “multiperspectival, participatory, arts-and-human-rights-based collaboration among academics, educators, Holocaust survivors, and artists for teaching & learning about the Holocaust in diverse, international public contexts.”
As part of this mission, they offer free and accessible visual storytelling resources in order to engage in dialogue-based teaching & learning processes for newer generations, including a podcast series. The latest conversation about Pedagogy and Narrative Art in Human Rights and Education is now available here. Relatedly, our University Archives is home to the Holocaust and World War II Memory Collection and we also have a Holocaust LibGuide.
These resources reflect the focus of both UVic and UVic Libraries’ commitment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, specifically UN SDG Goal 16 on peace and justice, as the UVic community continues to tackle contemporary issues of hatred, racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, ethnic conflict and genocide.
(on behalf of the Communications, Events, and Community Engagement Operational Group (CECE-OG): Christine Walde, Emily Garry, Inba Kehoe, Jennifer Wells, Lara Wilson, and Lisa Abram)
