Social Media, Genocide Commemoration, and Augmented Reality
Chair: Elaine Gan, Digital Humanities, USC
- Tomasz Łysak (University of Warsaw, Applied Linguistics)
“Vlogging Auschwitz: Towards Netnography of Digital Autobiographical Documentary”
- Maria Zalewska (USC, Cinematic Arts)
“Pokémon in Auschwitz: New Encounters Between Augmented Reality Technologies, Spaces of Memory, and Places of Commemoration”
- Timothy Williams (University of Marburg, Conflict Studies and Political Science)
“Awful, but you have to go…” Memory in the Digital Sphere of Tripadvisor.com Reviews of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Cambodia
Elaine Gan is a USC Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities and most recently, art director for the Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene Project (AURA) in Denmark. She studies the timing of human-plant interactions, specifically around rice cultivation, as technologies of life and death that make geopolitical histories. Recent projects include co-editing an anthology titled Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (Univ of Minnesota 2017) and co-curating an exhibition titled DUMP! Multispecies Making and Unmaking (Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark 2015). At USC, she is working on a book and digital project about time machines.
Maria Zalewska is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and a 2016-2018 Mellon Ph.D. Fellow in the Digital Humanities. Her research interests include cinematic representations of the Holocaust; documentary film; national and transnational modes and media of memorialization; digital humanities; politics of technologized memory; place and space in cinema; history as film/film as history; and political economy of film. Her dissertation project, “#Holocaust: Rethinking the Relationship Between Spaces of Memory and Places of Commemoration in The Digital Age,” focuses on the relationship between interactivity, (documentary) film studies, and Holocaust memory. She is the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research’s 2017 Graduate Student Fellow. In 2009-2010, she worked for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Foundation. Since 2010, she has continued to work for the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Foundation on a volunteer basis.
Timothy Williams is a research fellow at the Centre for Conflict Studies at Marburg University, Germany. His research deals with violence, focusing on its dynamics, particularly at the micro-level, as well as its consequences for post-conflict societies. He has conducted extensive field research in Cambodia and has been awarded the Emerging Scholar Prize of the International Association of Genocide Scholars in 2017, as well as the Raphael Lemkin Fellow of the Armenian Genocide Memorial and Institute in 2015. He studied at Mannheim University (BA Political Science) and at the London School of Economics (MSc Comparative Politics). Timothy has published in Terrorism and Political Violence, International Peacekeeping, Genocide Studies and Prevention, Transitional Justice Review, among others.
Tomasz Łysak, University of Warsaw, received his PhD in Philosophy from the Polish Academy of Sciences. His work focuses on representations of the Holocaust in relation to trauma studies and psychoanalysis. He has held fellowships at the University of Washington, Seattle, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Chicago. He published among others in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Kwartalnik Filmowy, Teksty Drugie and in a number of edited volumes. He has been awarded a research grant from the National Science Centre entitled “From Newsreel to Post-Traumatic Film: Documentary and Artistic Films on the Holocaust” (2013-2015). He has edited Antologia studiów nad traumą (Trauma studies anthology, Kraków 2015) and is the author of Od kroniki do filmu posttraumatycznego – filmy dokumentalne o Zagładzie (Warszawa 2016).