On February 9, Dr. Charlotte Schallié, co-director of SCVN, will take part in a roundtable discussion focused on the ethical considerations and protocols of arts-based research with trauma survivors.
Organized by the Emily Carr University Research Ethics Board (ECU-REB), the event will take place in person at the Emily Carr University, Boardroom (D2315) and online via Microsoft Teams (registration required).
Charlotte will be joined by Dr. Alla Gadassik, an animation scholar and curator whose work focuses on media materiality, creative labour, and animation exhibition practices. You can find more details about the speakers here.
Aubrey Pomerance working with objects from the Zwilsky collection at the Jewish Museum Berlin.Photo credit Charlotte Schallié.
What happens when family history becomes part of the public archive?
Join us for a presentation and discussion with Aubrey Pomerance, Head Archivist of the Jewish Museum Berlin; Klaus Zwilsky, Holocaust survivor; and Dr. Charlotte Schallié, SCVN project director and professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Victoria, as they examine how archives with personal histories can be developed with care.
As a curator, Aubrey Pomerance worked with the Zwilsky family’s documents, photographs and objects relating to their experiences in Berlin, Germany, where they survived the Holocaust at the Jewish Hospital. This webinar will explore Aubrey’s archiving of the ZwilskyCollection in conversation with Dr. Charlotte Schallié. They will be joined by Klaus to reflect upon his collaboration with Aubrey and the complexity of having personal family history become part of the public archives. The discussion will be followed by a question and answer period for attendees.
Left: Klaus Max Zwilsky, middle: Aubrey Pomerance, and right: Dr. Charlotte Schallié.
Aubrey Pomerance is the Head of Archives at the Jewish Museum Berlin. Born in Calgary, Canada, he studies Jewish Studies and History at the Freie Universität Berlin. There he was a research assistant at the Institut für Judaistik in 1995 and 1996 and thereafter at the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim Institut for German Jewish history in Duisburg. In April 2001, he took up his position at the Jewish Museum Berlin, being responsible for the establishment of a branch of the Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute and for the museum’s archival collection. He is the community liaison overseeing the Zwilsky Collection working with Klaus Zwilsky and his family, which connected him with the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives (SCVN) Project.
Klaus Max Zwilsky was born in Berlin, Germany, on August 16, 1932. He and his parents survived the Nazi regime in the Berlin Jewish Hospital, where his father was an administrator, while his mother did forced labor at Siemens. Following the end of the war, Klaus became the first boy to celebrate a Bar Mitzvah in Berlin. In 1946, he and his parents emigrated to the United States. After obtaining his Doctor of Science degree from MIT, Klaus pursued a career in Materials Science and Engineering.
In 2000, he began organizing an extensive collection of papers left by his parents, detailing the fate of his extended family who perished during the war. He organized his family’s personal papers from the war period and donated these documents to the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Klaus has frequently returned to Berlin to participate in Holocaust workshops for German high school students and other educational programs organized by the Jewish Museum Berlin. He has also spoken extensively to share his personal experiences with high school and middle school students as well as social and professional groups in the United States.
Charlotte Schallié is a Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Victoria. Her teaching and research interests include memory studies, visual culture studies & graphic narratives, teaching and learning about the Holocaust, genocide and human rights education, community-engaged participatory research and arts-based action research. Together with Dr. Andrea Webb (UBC), she is the co-director of the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives Project (www.visualnarratives.org), funded by a 7-year SSHRC Partnership Grant.
Thank you to the UBC’s Public Humanities Hub team for co-hosting and faciliating this webinar!
As noted above, on July 15, the Friends of Simon Wisenthal Center for Holocaust Studies will host a webinar titled “The ‘Two Roses’ Project: Arts-Based Storytelling and the Holocaust”, introducing the forthcoming graphic novel sharing the extraordinary story of Toronto-based Holocaust survivor Rose Lipszyc to the public.
The program will open with an introduction to the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives project, highlighting its ethics of care framework that centres the voices, agency, and emotional well-being of Holocaust survivors. This will be followed by an overview of Two Roses, including a brief reflection on Rose Lipszyc’s biography and lived experience.
Miriam Libicki will then read selected pages from Two Roses and join Dr. Charlotte Schallié and Dr. Mark Celinscak in a conversation about their collaborative work with Rose. They will discuss the unique potential of comics to convey survivor testimony with emotional depth and visual impact.
The event will conclude with a Q&A session, during which we are honoured to invite Rose to take part in the discussion.
How Can Visual Narratives Disrupt Traditional Conceptions of Testimony?
From January to November 2024, the University of British Columbia’s Public Humanities Hub co-hosted the Art and Testimony webinar series with the University of Victoria’s Survivor-Centered Visual Narratives project. The series brought together researchers, artists, historians, non-profit directors and other professionals to discuss how different mediums of artistic production can function as a form of testimony.
Building on the conversations, practices, and resources shared during the six webinars, SCVN is excited to announce the Art and Testimony Toolkit based on the webinar series. The toolkit includes recordings and transcripts of each of the six webinars categorized by three thematic clusters: 1) Performance as Testimony; 2) Videotaped Interviews, Graphic Novels and Comics as Testimony; and 3) Teaching through Visual Testimony. The toolkit also includes notes, commentary, illustrations, references and quotes that complement each webinar.
The toolkit is available on the UBC Public Humanities Hub website here.
Art and Testimony Webinar Series
The webinar series explored a wide range of artistic forms from live performance to graphic novels to newspaper comics, the series sought to highlight the power of testimony to tell stories in a unique way. For instance, Dr. Henry “Hank” Greenspan in the webinar ‘Listening, Telling, Showing (and Back)’ underlines how he sought to resist the ‘conventional’ testimonial approach by engaging in dialogue rather than extraction. By returning to the same survivors over months and even years, Hank sought to reconnect and develop the survivors’ stories as they pieced together parts of their memories, often evolving their own narratives.
In a similar vein, several webinars touched on how drawn narratives leave space for imagination and creation, both for those giving the testimonies and the researchers working with them. Barbara Yelin’s collaboration with Holocaust survivor Emmie Arbel demonstrates how drawn narratives function as a tool for engaging with memories that defy easy articulation. Developed initially from just seven pages of notes, their book, Emmie Arbel: Die Farbe der Erinnerung, grew out of what they called “puzzle memory work,” where they sought to hold space for the linearity of memory.
The webinar series emphasized how visual narratives have the potential to disrupt traditional testimony collection practices, which often favour language over image. In response, the toolkit builds upon our expert speakers’ knowledge and resources, and suggests various visual mediums and approaches to arts-based research methodologies for understanding survivor experiences.
SCVN would like to extend a warm thank you to all those who contributed to developing the toolkit. Special thanks to the author, Serikbolsyn Tastanbek; advisors, Heather Joan Tam, Jennifer Sauter, Charlotte Schallié, and Andrea Webb; technical support, Stanley Chia; illustrator, Raey Costain; and transcribers, Lucie Kotesovska, Kate Kristianson, Henri Jefferis, and Claire Fenton. The toolkit would have never come together without the hard work and dedication of the team.
To view the Art and Testimony Webinar Series, please click here.
In February 2023, graphic artist Tobi Dahmen was introduced to Syrian survivor Akram al-Saud by Dr. Uğur Ümit Üngör, the Research Cluster Co-Lead on the SSHRC Partnership Grant Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives Project. Based in The Netherlands, Tobi and Akram have been collaborating locally over two years in a series of interviews to share Akram’s unique story of surviving a series of Syrian prisons.
Since the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime on December 8, 2024, Syria has opened up to the world again, and the international community has begun to learn more about the oppression and injustices of the regime. This webinar will feature Tobi Dahmen and Akram al-Saud discussing their collaboration, in conversation with Dr. Üngör and Project Director Dr. Charlotte Schallié. They will explore the difficulties of representing imprisonment and torture, and how graphic narratives can help survivors of mass violence find a voice.
Tobi Dahmen Tobi Dahmen, born in 1971 in Frankfurt/Main, is a German illustrator and comic artist. He has published several comic books, including Fahrradmod (2015). Dahmen has received numerous awards for his work and is currently working on a new graphic novel with a Syrian survivor as part of the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives Project. The graphic novel Columbusstrasse: Eine Familiengeschichte 1935-1945, was released on May 29, 2024, and is available to order online here.
Akram al-Saud Akram al-Saud is from Deir Ez-Zor and now lives in the Netherlands. He has been arrested four times before fleeing from Syria. His longest detention began on March 28th, 2010—before the revolution—and lasted for nine months. At the time, he was a student at the Faculty of Architecture in Aleppo, and was arrested by the intelligence services of the air force. After the 2011 revolution, he was arrested three more times. Dr. Uğur Ümit Üngör Uğur Ümit Üngör (PhD Amsterdam, 2009) is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies. His main areas of interest are genocide and mass violence, with a particular focus on the modern and contemporary Middle East. He is an editor of the Journal of Perpetrator Research, and coordinator of the Syria Oral History Project. His publications include Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (Continuum, 2011), and the award-winning The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2011). From 2014 to 2019, Üngör coordinated a Dutch Research Council-funded research project on paramilitarism, which led to the monograph Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State (Oxford University Press, 2020). He is currently working on its follow-up monograph Assad’s Militias and Mass Violence in Syria (forthcoming, 2025). He is also co-author of Syrian Gulag: Assad’s Prison System, 1970-2020 (I.B.Tauris, 2023).
Dr. Charlotte Schallié Charlotte Schallié is a Professor of Germanic Studies in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture at the University of Victoria (Canada). Her teaching and research interests include memory studies, visual culture studies & graphic narratives, teaching and learning about the Holocaust, genocide and human rights education, community-engaged participatory research, care ethics, and arts-based action research. Together with Dr. Andrea Webb (UBC), she is the Project Director of a 7-year SSHRC-funded Partnership Grant entitled Visual Storytelling and Graphic Art in Genocide and Human Rights Education.
Thank you to our project partner, the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria, for hosting this webinar. A special thanks to Jodie Walsh, Operations Director and Research Coordinator, and Lia Lancaster, Events and Administration Assistant, for their invaluable support.
Gallery of ‘Examining the Holocaust’ exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Images courtesy of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
In an upcoming webinar on January 29, Co-Director Dr. Andrea Webb will be discussing ways that educators can bring Holocaust education into the classroom with respect and consideration. She is joined by Ashley Groff, Interpretive Program Developer from the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), and institutional host of the webinar in collaboration with the Survivor‐Centred Visual Narratives Project. Webinar participants will be provided with resources that support Holocaust education, teaching about genocides, and teaching about human rights. They will also learn where to seek support and leave with tools to help them teach students Holocaust‐related content according to their provincial or territorial mandate.
“Supporting Educators in Holocaust Education” Wednesday, January 29, 2025 12:00 – 1:00 pm PST / 2:00 – 3:00 pm CST
In the SCVN webinar series, Art and Testimony, Ph.D. students Cal Smith and Raey Costain presented their research on how visual methods such as comic drawing have a unique capacity to explore and document human stories in the past and present. The webinar, The Art of Comics-Engaged Research, was moderated by Dr. Mary Chapman and involved active engagement by the attendees. The session began with a drawing exercise, lead by Raey, where they asked participants to doodle material related to what’s in front of them, what’s behind them, and where they’re sitting. The activity was designed to situate speakers and participants. Instructions for hosting or participating in the activity can be found below.
The webinar continued with Raey presenting on drawing as an artistic practice, both related to their personal drawings and the act of researching drawings done by others. After that, Cal shared part of his potential Ph.D. research on queer comics in Canada in the 1980s and 90s. He focused on the practice of research that has defined his early relationship with his Ph.D. Both speakers were intensely interested in what stories a doodle or a sketch can illuminate and the power of paying attention to the infinitesimally small details in such unassuming graphic narratives.
Raey’s activity is designed to situate speakers and participants. This activity is for everyone, no matter their drawing “talent” or experience! We would recommend underlining the sensations that go into drawing. Ask, “What does it feel like to pick up a pen and draw? What goes into finding inspiration? Where does your mind wander?” Mention that it’s ok to just breadth and reflect before putting the pen to the page.
Ask participants to grab something to draw with.
Draw three squares that are roughly the same size on a piece of paper. They can be vertical or horizontal.
In the first square, ask everyone to draw something ahead of you, i.e. something you can see in your environment. Maybe it’s the computer monitor or a coffee cup!
In the second square, ask everyone to draw something behind them. This can be physically behind them in their environment, or it can be understood more metaphorically as something behind them; something you’ve moved through, or someone, say, standing behind you.
In the final square, ask everyone to draw something related to where their feet are. This can also be taken literally or metaphorically. Maybe consider the territory you’re physically on, or, where your standing in life.
In a large group, the activity leader might say a few words reflecting on the activity. In a smaller group, you might invite others to reflect.
Finally, you may choose to invite people to share their work if they’re comfortable. There’s no pressure to do this, as the activity is principally a moment of personal reflection.
On October 29, graphic artist Barbara Yelin and SCVN Co-Director Dr. Charlotte Schallié will be featured in a public online webinar as part of the 27th Workshop on National Socialist Camps and Killing Sites. Barbara and Charlotte will be reading from the publication ‘But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust.’ This webinar and the other workshop activities are geared towards young scholars who are interested in working with stories and histories of camps and killing sites associated with genocide and mass atrocity worldwide.
In addition to reading from ‘But I Live,’ Charlotte and Barbara will engage in a dialogue about trauma-informed storytelling and the compelling power of drawing as a language to communicate about stories of memory, trauma, and resilience. The visual testimony of Holocaust child survivor Emmie Arbel, collected in ‘But I Live’ by Barbara Yelin is one example of how visual arts can be engaged in Holocaust education and communication.
Event Details:
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
5:00 pm CET /11:00 am PDT
Sweelinckzaal, Room 0.05, Utrecht University, Drift 21, 3512 BR Utrecht or online via zoom
From April to November 2023, the Public Humanities Hub at the University of British Columbia co-hosted with the University of Victoria’s Survivor-Centered Visual Narratives project a webinar series on the Ethics of Trauma-Informed Research. The series of zoom conversations featured researchers, educators, journalists, artists and other professionals focusing on trauma in their work. The toolkit is accessible on the UBC’s Public Humanities Hub website and builds on the experience, practice, and resources shared by these experts during the six webinars of the series.
The speakers’ experiences and perspectives regarding trauma in the aftermath of genocide, mass atrocities, war, and other events vary considerably, but, as this toolkit documents and emphasizes, the central focus remains the same. According to Ying Han and Sydney Lines, the authors of the toolkit, it is “overcoming the ‘trust’ gap between community and researchers, and approaching the research with ethics of care” which represents the main concern shared by all guests in the webinar series regardless the variable terminology they might use when they talk about their research and professional practice. ‘Survivor-centered approach’, ‘people-centered approach’, ‘grassroots approach’, ‘participatory research’, and ‘co-produced research’ are used in the toolkit to refer to the central concern and methodology.
The toolkit contains the recordings of the original webinars as well as the transcript of each of the sessions and is organized into four thematic clusters: Trauma-Informed Research as Witnessing, Trauma-Informed Research as Pedagogy, Trauma-Informed Methods of Public Scholarship, and Trauma-Informed Research and Arts-based Methods. Each of these clusters introduces and explores a particular method of trauma-informed research discussed in the webinar conversations via brief summaries of the key points and the experts’ own words. Further, each cluster points to resources available at the UBC and beyond that might be of help to those who wish to explore and apply the given methodology in their own trauma-informed research.
Infographics by Raey Costain.
Rather than “mapping out trauma on a diagnostic level”, the main focus and motivation of this toolkit is documenting the variety of experience-based research approaches to trauma. This emphasis allows its readers to consider how this type of research can help open up pathways to post-traumatic growth and resilience, and it also draws attention to the fact that this type of research often causes emotional or psychological discomfort or distress for subjects, participants, collaborators, and researchers alike. As the authors emphasize, “it is incumbent upon researchers and practitioners to build in ways to cultivate an awareness of the possible trauma responses that participants may experience, anticipate the risks of re-traumatization, and to learn how to hold space for recovery and care for all parties involved”. The Trauma-Informed Research Toolkit is exactly the place where to start when looking for possible guidance and inspiration.
