Newsletters and Essays

Adopting Martin Leiner’s definition of reconciliation as the restoration and maintenance of “good” relations between parties formerly involved in conflict, countless intersections of truth and collective memory can be imagined in the unfolding of this process. The “truth” about the details of the conflict itself, about the roles of various actors, about the identities of the groups or individuals involved, even about the existence of conflict and the need for reconciliation itself. The International Association for Reconciliation Studies (IARS) Annual Conference at Seoul National University in South Korea from July 14-18 was an opportunity to consider where and how truth and collective memory intersect.

Truth, reconciliation and a post-truth world

The IARS panel on Voice, Narrative, and Storytelling presented truth as both a path and a barrier to reconciliation. While truth-telling has provided a means of empowerment for communities in South Africa through relaying lived experiences of the Apartheid, differing conceptions of truth between government, academia and families in the wake of a South Korean ferry disaster acted as a barrier to reconciliation between the groups. The relationship between truth and reconciliation is already complicated; how will it be impacted by the acceleration of the post-truth society? Will truth-telling help to overcome the current tendencies toward separate social and political realities enhanced by mass and social media? Or will truth lose its meaning in popular discourse, complicating reconciliation processes? While there are more questions than answers, these reflections prompted new ideas about my current project.

Collective memory and higher education institutions

I presented “A Framework for Understanding the Role of Higher Education in Reconciliation: The Case of US-Japan Relations,” in which I drew on Wertsch’s (2002) concept of collective memory as mediated action, Levy & Sznaider’s (2002) cosmopolitan memory, and organizational theory to build a framework for analyzing how universities act as a site of contestation between global and national narratives. Through these lenses, national and global narratives are tools used to form and maintain collective memory, which can exist at both the national and supra-national levels. Universities negotiate national and global narratives through parallel processes of isomorphism and identity formation.

The discussions on truth and truth-telling, and my reflections on truth in a post-truth world provided analytical hints for the development of my research. In the current project I am comparing how universities in Japan and the US reinforce, resist or negotiate between global and national narratives of World War II in the 1960s and present. While this has direct implications for collective memory, adding truth as an analytical layer could uncover a deeper understanding of the process of how collective memory is formed and maintained through and within universities. Can universities be spaces for truth-telling? Are they instruments for dominant versions of the truth? As mentioned above, truth has been used as a tool for empowerment in reconciliation, yet it has also been conceptualized as an imposed, top-down construct in certain contexts in which governments control memories of the past.

Collective remembering and collective forgetting

During our panel, “Reconciliation Through International Higher Education: From the Individual to the Institution,” a question was raised on the possibility of reconciliation without two willing sides. In other words, what if one of the sides does not recognize the need to reconcile? The field of memory studies draws on the ideas of collective remembering and collective forgetting as active processes impacted by both environmental and psychological factors. When thinking about the willingness to reconcile in the context of collective forgetting and post-truth, a logic can be drawn between the three. Top-down and bottom-up process of collective forgetting based on a version of the past that denies the truths of oppressed groups can be easily imagined. How have universities influenced collective memory processes and how will this change in the post-truth world?