What is it?
Our inaugural ‘expo’ seeks to bring together Holocaust heritage and education experts, policymakers, academics, and creative and tech professionals to share practice and research, learn more about digital Holocaust memory pasts and present, and to connect and begin to design digital Holocaust memory futures!
This is not your usual ‘academic conference’, rather we hope to offer lots of opportunities for hands-on play, experimentation and learning; networking; and showcasing excellent practice as well as research.
Where is it?
University of Sussex, UK
Situated in a valley of the beautiful South Downs National Park and only a short bus or train ride from the Brighton seaside.
When is it?
24th-26th June 2025
Call for Contributions
Holocaust memory as a cultural phenomenon is not solely shaped by the actual, cognitive remembering of those who lived through this traumatic past. For commemoration to persist long into the future, the significance of the past must be taken on bodily, cognitively, and culturally by those who did not experience it. Co-mmemoration is a fluid, ongoing, creative, collaborative process shaped by an increasing number of actants – human and non-human.
Whilst the voice of survivors will no doubt continue to be an essential element of Holocaust education, the memory-makers of tomorrow (and indeed today) are a diverse range of players: from curators, historians, pedagogues and archivists through to coders, programmers, social media managers, software engineers, and influencers. The Holocaust sector needs to be equipped with the skills to navigate digital production cultures as much as digital creators need the skills to deal with this traumatic past sensitively and with nuance. Alongside these human agents, digital technologies can arguably be considered to be ‘memory-makers’ too as they bring their specific affordances to bear on the form of Holocaust commemoration.
We are pleased to announce we will be hosting the first Connective Holocaust Commemoration Expo at the University of Sussex in June 2025. This three-day international event welcomes Holocaust heritage and education experts, academics, and creative and tech professionals to come together to explore the past, present and future of digital Holocaust memory.
At this inaugural expo, we welcome contributions responding to the following themes:
Medium
- Computational logics in dialogue with Holocaust memory and education practice
- VR, AR, MR and 360-degree projects
- Computer games
- Digitisation and digitalisation of testimonies and material evidence
- Social media
- AI, machine learning and algorithms – computer-generated Holocaust memory
- Audio tours, apps and digital exhibitions
- Digitally-connective approaches to Holocaust memory, e.g., embracing modularity, crowdsourcing and/or open source data
- Do computational media offer anything new for Holocaust memory, or are we seeing more of the same?
Politics
- Impact of local, national and international memory politics on digital projects
- Environmental sustainability
- (De)colonisation, Post-October 7th, and antisemitism: digital Holocaust memory in wider political contexts
- Funding: challenges, opportunities and risks
- Policy-level thinking
- What is the role of (digital) Holocaust memory and education in the context of heightened visibility of denial, distortion and trivialisation online?
Ethics
- Taboos: aesthetics, the prohibition to overwhelm, can the past be made playable?
- Interactivity, agency and the role of users
- Preparing for bad actors: deep fakes and bots
- Are personalised experiences the future of Holocaust education?
- Consent and permission – re-mediation and remixing of analogue (and digital) content
- Do debates about the limits of representation still matter?
Pedagogy
- Impact and user analysis
- Pedagogical underpinnings of digital projects
- The intersections between Holocaust Studies, memory studies, media studies, and computer sciences in informing digital Holocaust memory – in what disciplines does (digital) Holocaust education sit?
- Highlighting lesser known historical narratives through digital means
- Digital literacies in the Holocaust sector
- Do digital technologies offer new ways to conceptualize Holocaust education?
Practice
- Lesson learnt from developing digital Holocaust memory projects
- Current state of the digital Holocaust memoryscape
- Challenges of sustainable digital Holocaust memory production
- Opportunities for international and interdisciplinary collaborations
- Is there a place for innovation in Holocaust memory?
- Who are today’s memory-makers, and what are the implications of this for the future of Holocaust memory?
- Reflection on the digital present and futures: Who counts as a Holocaust ‘witness’ in digital spaces? What role can Holocaust survivors and perpetrators play in future digital projects, alongside generations to come?
We welcome potential contributors from Holocaust organisations or projects, academia, governmental, transnational and NGO agencies, and the creative and tech industries to submit proposals for the following programme strands:
- Exhibitor space
Stands where you can display a research poster or present your Holocaust-related digital outputs. Also available to corporate entities, including publishers for a fee (please enquire). The exhibitor space will be small stalls with space to demonstrate and discuss your work.
- Arcade and ‘Let’s Play’
Exhibitors of interactive works can present these in the arcade space for expo attendees to play through the event. We welcome all projects that engage with the Holocaust and/or the Nazi Occupation era. We also welcome proposals for collaborative ‘Let’s Play’ sessions led by professionals within the video game industry, alongside discussion and dialogue with other experts. ‘Let’s Play’ sessions should include at least an interviewer, a discussant and a player.
- Showcase (1 hour)
Present your digital Holocaust memory projects! This could be work-in-progress that you would like to present to an audience for feedback or for structured user testing, or a finished project you want to tell the world about.
- Hypertalks (10-15 minute presentations on 1.5 hour long panels with Q&A)
We welcome proposals for pre-constituted panels or individual presentations. Hypertalks should be research-informed. These can either take the form of short academic papers or R&D or impact analysis of practical projects.
- Practical Workshops (up to 3 hours)
Skills-based workshops – these sessions allow you to share your own practical skills with a wider audience supporting the digital literacies and capacities of the Holocaust sector. This could be digital humanities analysis through to project managing a computer game, or practical skills such as recording your own 3D or AR elements or working with software like Unity or Content Management Systems. These should be pitched for beginners.
- Networking
There will also be the opportunity to book networking rooms for 1-2-1 chats, project team meetings, or space for thematic networking events – we welcome proposals for open sessions. [If you would like to arrange private meetings for your existing network or project team, please email us separately rather than submit this via the submission form.]
Potential contributors are welcome to submit to more than one strand.
Deadline for Submissions: 23:45 Thursday 5th December 2024
SUBMISSIONS
Please submit your proposals for contributions via our online form.
The expo is free to attend (except for corporate partners). Accommodation and meals will be provided. We ask contributors to cover their own travel expenses only.