Lecture Series

Graphic Novels, Holocaust Memory and Human Rights

Learning about and for Human Rights in Holocaust education contributes to a critical engagement with social justice; it teaches students to respect and defend the “right to have rights” (Hannah Arendt). Visual storytelling in graphic narratives is especially effective for life stories of child-survivors as they recall their memories in a vivid associative context, which intuitively lends itself to visual representation. In this presentation, I will introduce a community-engaged project that centers the biographies of four Holocaust child survivors to co-create both graphic novels and new trust-based methods for testimony collection.

Charlotte Schallié is a Professor and Chair of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria. Her teaching and research interests include post-1945 diasporic and transcultural writing/filmmaking, memory studies, Jewish identity in contemporary cultural discourse, and teaching and learning about the Holocaust. She is the co-editor of Under Swiss Protection: Jewish Eyewitness Accounts from Wartime Budapest (2017). Her current research project —“Narrative Art and Visual Storytelling in Holocaust and Human Rights Education” (www.holocaustgraphicnovels.org) — is working on developing a new trauma-informed pedagogy in Holocaust and Human Rights education fostering broad and deep collaborations and intercultural exchange between Holocaust survivors, visual artists, researchers, students, and community partners in Canada, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US.