Lost in Silence: Children's Geographies and Material Memories of the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971.

The Bangladesh liberation war in 1971 resulted in creating new identities for people affected and displaced by the cataclysmic event. Despite its mnemonic significance, individual memories of children's everyday spaces in Bangladesh and India during the war remain rare. This PhD project will explore how the spatiotemporal and material aspects of schools might mediate memories of the Bangladesh liberation war. The research will explore the interactions between children's war memories in the school environments and those constituted since then - and still visible - in the materialities of schools affected by the conflict. The research draws from the interdisciplinary framework of children's geographies and memory studies, with emphasis on children's everyday lives (Silova et al, 2018), children's experiences of war (Wells, 2017) and children's lifelong relationship with the material environment (Kraftl, 2020).

The research will analyse how the spaces of schools affected during the war and their materiality intersect with individual childhood memories and generate transgenerational memories. It will further locate collective memories generated by the States in the spaces of schools. The interrelationship between individual, transgenerational and collective memories will help in (re)interpreting the war narratives in the spaces of schools in Bangladesh and India.
The qualitative PhD research will be based on ethnographically-oriented methods, such as observations, interviews and archival research. Observations will be regarding the material memories of the war preserved in the schools and surrounding environments, such as photos, documents and memorabilia. Interviews with former students at these schools will provide understanding of their material memories of childhood during the war. Similarly, interviews of children in the same schools/neighbourhoods in present times will offer understanding of the transgenerational memories of the war. The archival research, such as press reports, government documents, photographs and memorabilia preserved by the States in the spaces of schools will give insights of the collective memories.

In South Asia, pioneering efforts like the Liberation war museum in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the online museum of material memory of the Indian subcontinent, the Partition museum in Amritsar, Unlock Hundarman museum of memories at India-Pakistan border in Kashmir, have raised awareness of the relevance of material memories. Adding to this, the PhD research will open new pathways
of children's engagement with spaces in conflict zones.