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Please Join the ICAR Community as PhD student Athanasios Gatsias defends his proposal for a dissertation entitled:
"Representation of 'Self' and 'Other' in History Textbooks: Exploring Popular Responses to Attempted Changes in the Dominant Discourse: The Case of 6th Grade History Textbook Revision in Greece."
Abstract:
Historical narratives play detrimental roles in providing the cognitive, affective and evaluative paradigms within which groups develop an understanding of their identity, as well as their place in the world. Importantly, they stand as major determinants of the nature of the relational space and interaction patterns between groups, which is often conflictual. Over the last decades, this reality, coupled with an increasing realization that educational institutions lay among the major loci of production and reproduction of historical narratives, led to a number of initiatives directed towards the revision of history curricula in a number of countries. These initiatives have been, often, recieved with, at best, caution and, at worse, strong resistance. The intention of the proposed study is to explore the factors that shape people's response to such peace-building initiatives (revision of history textbooks) that are meant to change dominant historical narratives and break the cycle of problematic collective axiologies. Insights for answering this question will be drawn through the exploration of a textbook revision initiative that took place in Greece at the turn of the new century, meant to alter the dominant historical discourse produced and reproduced through history education.