CLM working meeting 2017 Amsterdam

8 + 9 November 2017

 

Connecting Law and Memory”, consists of a three year cycle of conferences, seminars and workshops organized by Kazerne Dossin, together with International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), the Belgian Federal Police , the Council of Europe and Anne Frank House.
Starting from the experiences gained at Kazerne Dossin’s program “Holocaust, Police and Human Rights”, the overall aims are to create a coordinating forum and network for sharing and benchmarking expertise, intended to strengthen civil servants resilience.
The opening conference (Mechelen, September 2016) offered an overview of the existing outreach programs, distributed educational materials, exchanged good practices and created a context
developing a roadmap for further in-depth work.
A concluding conference will in 2018 build on the achievements, take stock of the results and intends to present an action oriented plan to the policy level.
Aims of the Amsterdam Seminar and Workshops :
Finding elements of answer to :
– How to improve the museum experience and to better engage law enforcement civil servants visiting museums dedicatedto remembrance and human rights?
– How to turn civil servants’ experience of visiting or getting a training at a memorial museum into action? How to get beyond the feelings of sympathy, sadness and outrageinto an experience activating visitors for a better humanity?
– How to turn institutions memorializing genocide into institutions helping to prevent it?

 

 

ORGANIZING PARTNERS

Kazerne Dossin, Federal Police, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance,  Anne Frank House, Council of Europe and Vrije Universiteit Brussel

  • DAY 1
    08/11/2017
  • DAY 2
    09/11/2017

Welcoming words and introduction by the organizers and host.

Bridging historical Insights towards contemporary Challenges.
Hans Christian Jasch (Haus der Wannsee)

Watch his lecture here

Talking about? - Framework and relevance for civil servants
  • What are the main challenges todays’ law enforcement is confronted with (erosion of traditional values, erosion of societal structures and their inherent authority, increased diversity ofethnic groups with corresponding value systems, extremism, …)
  • Is the historical knowledge relevant/comparable to the challenges today’s law enforcement/civil servants are confronted with?
  • How can we translate the historical knowledge to the role of civil servants (police, justice, authorities) today as victim, bystander or perpetrator?
  • What is the place of the historical knowledge on victims, bystanders, perpetrators in the consciousness of civil servants?And in their daily work?

Plenary

Focusing on? - Mechanisms, dynamics and social media
  • What is the message on mas atrocity crimes, radicalization and/or polarization nowadays?
  • How can we use this message to work towards an inclusive society guaranteeing minority rights and to prevent polarization/radicalization?
  • What is the role of civil servants in this?
  • Can law enforcement/civil servants take the role of positive catalyst or should this be left to social workers and democratically elected political leaders?
  • ‘Social media’ and internet have become major sources of information and have developed into powerful instruments of mobilization. Except in authoritarian regimes, governance of the IT sector is still largely left to autoregulation and/or to private initiative. Should cyberspace be considered a ‘public good’ and be subject to certain fundamental principles and rules?

Plenary

Preventing that? -Implementing & capacity building
  • How to spread the message of CLM among different groups of recipients? Is a top-down approach the better method or can the initiative be triggered by group members? How to motivate them?
  • How to prevent barrierslike getting the policy level of an organization on board, how to find the right partners, on which concepts you define goals?
  • Is using real cases a barrier or not, how to find the right trainers for each target group and how to find the funding?
  • How to setup a network and build a community?

Plenary

Watch the results here

Closure

 

‘Impact research on the HPH project – lessons learned’
Bram Spruyt

Bram Spruyt is assistant professor of Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He teaches Sociology, Cultural sociology, Researching culture. His main research interests include public opinion research, youth research, sociology of education and cultural sociology.

 

Read his lecture here

Watch his lecture here

The INZOVUcurve model- ‘Moving Us to Action: the New Model of Museums and Memorials’
Keynote by Jason Ulaszek
Memorials play an important role of teaching and moving us so that we will never feel detached and complicit again of tragic events that injured humanity. But most of the time when we visit such places, we remain shocked but unable to act beyond that experience. Virtually every visitor to a genocide memorial or holocaust museum can attest to overwhelming feelings of sympathy, sadness and outrage, but most visitors can also attest that they did nothing substantively differently as a result.
How can we redesign the experience of those memorials to activate civil servants for a better humanity?
In our work with organizations around the world, including the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda, we believe we have come to see the outline of a new institution needed.
We believe the next generation of genocide museums and memorials will not be like conventional memorials. They will be a new kind of institution -an institution that proactively addresses global challenges of intolerance and violence, leverages new technologies to enable global impact, connects the next generation to the stories of past atrocities without the help of generations that witnessed them and a more determined, humble view of how outsiders should intervene to stop violence.
What does this new institution look like and how can their experiences activate visitors for a better humanity? And, how can you begin to understand the changes required in your own institution and its programs and services to further engage the visitor and shift towards a stronger agent for change?
This presentation will share insights on the characteristics required by these new institutions and a modeldeveloped from our work with the Kigali Genocide Memorial, the Inzovu Curve, that can help shift an institutions’  experience from awareness to action.

The Inzovu Curve maps a prototypical journey of a person going through the transformative experience of a museum reaching a state of motivation and action.

More info.

Watch his lecture here

Modeling for effects
  • Do we know of methods and alternatives to train empathy and compassion?
  • Law enforcement/civil servants are trained and expected to remain calm and rational in all circumstances. How to bridge the gap between the acquired attitude of rationality and the experiences of empathy leading to compassion, when implementing training programs in Holocaust/genocide museums and memorials?
  • What kind of innovative educational solutions can keep up
    with the changing reality?
  • How can education on memorial sites shape the responsibility
    of civil servants?
Measuring impact? - Quality standards and evaluation structures
  • What is the current state of research on evaluation standards for training programs for civil servants? For what reason should these kind of programs be developed and run?
  • Which level of the civil servant organization should be trainedor have experience, how and why evaluate the development phase?
  • How do you implement a risk analysis and impact mechanisms? How do you formulate the objectives and tasks?
  • How do you define target groups and exclusion/conclusion criteria?
  • Is a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook a must? How do you create a possibility for feedback? What do you do with the received feedback?
  • How do we build this in the program structure and how do we deal with incidents?
  • How do we create transparency on processes, finances, personnel, structures? How can transparency help in gaining trust of future target groups, participants?
Presentation of methods and output of Connecting Law&Memory with a visual representation of the results
Closing

Closing words by representatives of Council of Europe (CoE) and International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

 Watch the closing words here