New challenges for post-communist remembrance cultures: Interdisciplinary perspectives in transitional justice

The proposed network addresses academic and practitioner debates in the field of transitional justice related to how the controversial history of communism is remembered Central and Eastern Europe. It brings together scholars, practitioners, and members of the public, to discuss how, the often-separate intellectual pursuits of humanities scholars and professionals in the area of transitional justice, can be brought in closer contact and communication. It also explores a key challenge in transitional justice: how to bridge, and how to address, the pressing generational gap in perceptions of communism, especially the perceptions and understandings of a new generation of young people, that are bringing about a host of new challenges, as well as opportunities, for taking the legacy of communism into public consciousness.

The key aim of the network is to offer academics, practitioners, and members of the public a shared intellectual platform for addressing some of the key challenges in European transitional justice. The network aims to achieve public impact through partnership or collaboration with non-academic (Polish Institute of National Remembrance, Poland; Sighet Museum and Memorial, Romania; Loughborough University Arts) and academic partners (Imre Kertesz institute, Germany) with a track record of public impact and good practice.

The network delivers public impact in three key areas:
1) Enhancing the political participation of young people by innovating in the area of transitional justice practices
Activity: Co-designing and promoting, with the collaboration of The Polish Institute of National Remembrance, of an active citizenship and advocacy digital portfolio and a facilitator's toolkit that fills a substantive gap in active participatory approaches in transitional justice. The portfolio will actively promote youth empowerment and education by enhancing young people's historical literacy and transferable skills for advocacy. The key upshot of this type of impact activity is to offer transferable insights that will help researchers, practitioners, and educators, reflect upon and subsequently improve the afterlife of transitional justice practices by suggesting new creative, digital, alternatives to established, traditional, practices based on archives, commemorations, media collections, exhibitions and oral histories.
2) Enhancing the awareness, knowledge and skills of public and third sector organizations, and of members of the public, by facilitating dialogue and deliberation around educational challenges in transitional justice.
Activities:
a) Deliberative workshops, 'citizen juries', organized by the Sighet Museum (Romania) with members of the public/museum visitors on the shape and content of the national curriculum around the history/legacy of communism, and visitor perspectives on local, national and pan-European history of suffering under communism.
b) Presentations by artists commissioned by Loughborough University Arts, a panel discussion and a presentation of artists' work in the Martin Hall gallery at Loughborough University on social transformations, memory, temporality, witnessing, activism and memory to coincide with the international conference.

3) Providing fresh perspectives to support wider engagement and community-led foundation to public policies in uncertain political times

Activity: A workshop/roundtable organized by the Imre Kertesz Institute that gives members of the public and practitioners a meaningful platform for debating and contributing to debates on transitional measures and practices.

With the support of partner and collaborator organizations, the network will produce, and promote, educational material that will feed into the national curriculum (where one exists) and the creation of a national curriculum (where one does not exist), as well as debates around curating controversial pasts.
By addressing impact by involving non-academic partners the network will benefit not only academics, but also policymakers, journalists, museum curators, human rights activists, lawyers and legal scholars, local and national authorities, professionals working in NGOs.
The establishment of the network will help Loughborough University develop as a major international collaboration hub research and collaboration in cross- and trans-disciplinary approaches in transitional justice. UK-based research and researchers will be given maximum visibility and influence at the forefront of debates in this enduring, crucial, area of public, political and policy concern.