RePAST-NOR is a project with specific activities that will introduce innovative tools for dealing with troubled past. This project will introduce the Horizin 2020 project RePAST’s developed innovative ways of learning about and negotiating discourses and narratives about Europe’s troubled and contested past – with a focus on Norway. Through the activities planned, the findings and innovative tools and methods will be implemented in Norway with a focus on the following target groups: school children, youth, the tourism industry, museums, students, municipalities, academics, and journalists. These groups will gain access to research results and new digital tools in critically assessing history. Through the RePAST project we have, in addition to academic outputs (article and books) developed a series of games called “Fact Finders” where the users can navigate through difficult scenarios from conflicts in Europe. We have also developed a tour experience in eight European cities where the users navigate with their mobile phones to physical monuments and institutions related to the past and learn by using a “GeoCatch” technology. Furthermore, we have developed educational material for museums and tourism organizations dealing with “dark tourism” (tourism to places of past conflicts), a growing trend in the tourism industry. Also, material helping journalists cover difficult issues of conflicts, including sexual abuse. This, and more, will be implemented in Norway through RePAST-NOR.
Background and needs:
Description of RePAST:
RePAST aims at investigating how European societies deal with their troubled pasts today through the analysis of conflict discourses rooted in those pasts, with a view on the impact of those discourses on European integration. It will implement actions and propose strategies, both at the levels of policy-making and civil society, for reflecting upon these discourses to strengthen European integration. The project addresses directly the specific challenge and scope of the topic CULT-COOP-02-2017, focusing on civil society, informal education, and political discourses. The methodological approach of RePAST is based on (i) multidisciplinarity, (ii) cross-country comparative analysis and (iii) innovative actions for citizens’ engagement with troubled pasts. First, conflict discourses rooted in troubled pasts will be studied in four fundamental spaces of civil society and sources of informal education: (a) history (oral and official), (b) media (journalistic- and citizen-led media), (c) art and culture, (d) politics (formal and informal politics). It also takes into account how the current crisis in its multiple forms (economic crisis, refugee crisis, political crisis) mediates these narratives. RePAST brings the various disciplines in dialogue with each other on the ground of an empirical study across the geographical and historical spectrum. Second, RePAST studies comparatively eight cases of countries whose troubled pasts sit squarely on legacies that still endanger European integration today: Cyprus, Germany, Poland, Greece, Bosnia, Kosovo, Ireland, and Spain. Lastly, RePAST emphasizes the active engagement of memory agents through a series of innovative actions for creating participatory experiences, i.e. interactive storytelling, research tool for analysis on memory and conflict, workshops for cultural tourism professionals, a treasure-hunt game to discover troubled pasts, and digital games for renegotiating troubled pasts.
