The Terrorscapes project has been awarded the Euromediterreanean Prize, during a ceremony held in Rome on last 30 May. This prize is awarded to institutional communication projects which enhance the partnership between the public and the private sector in the Euro-Mediterreanen area.
The Theme Group coordinators, Rob van der Laarse and Georgi Verbeeck, received the prize. Some pictures of the award ceremony can be found here.
Motivation by the Jury
“Terrorscapes won the Euromediterranean award with this motivation: For the moral value, cultural and social research, aimed at showing critically, through the contributions of scholars from different fields, how the image of Europe, as a transnational and integrated space, is based not only on criteria of political and economic sharing, but also on a common “topography of Memory”, which has its roots in a series of collective historical traumas – from Auschwitz to the Balkan genocides – subject of different practices of memorialisation – from monumentalization to the mediation until the Tourist ritualization – that make it a fundamental element of identity of European citizenship in the course of formation.”
About the “Terrorscapes” Theme Group
The “Terrorscapes” Theme Group spent the first semester of 2012/2013 at NIAS. Their project aimed to reveal how Europe’s WWII topography of memory has expanded over the years, and how it has completely been transformed by the integration of new member states into the European Union in the last decade. For after a period of commemorating the Second World War along national and often nationalist lines, Auschwitz and other Holocaust and Nazi terror related sites gradually developed into significant icons of modern European identity.
Focusing on transnational memory and terrorscapes, by comparative research at iconic sites as well as newly recovered places and traces, the project is expected to contribute to a deeper insight, for academics as well as heritage professionals, into processes of memory making as well as forgetting and the negotiation of contested memories of conflicted pasts.
The Theme Group consisted of:
Rob van der Laarse, University of Amsterdam
Francesco Mazzucchelli, University of Bologna
Robert Jan van Pelt, University of Waterloo, ON
Carlos Reijnen, University of Amsterdam
Karen Till, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Georgi Verbeeck, Maastricht University
External participants:
Britt Baillie, University of Cambridge
Gilly Carr, University of Cambridge
Marek Jasinski, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim
Anna-Kaisa Kuusisto-Arponen, University of Tampere
Caroline Sturdy Colls, Staffordshire University
Geneviève Zubrzycki, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Terrorscapes Theme Group and Academic Guests at NIAS in winter 2012.