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Do Media Literacies Have a Place in Holocaust Education?

By Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden Recent opportunities to engage with Holocaust education experts through the Lab have left us contemplating the role of media literacies.  Lab Director Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden explains why a change is needed and presents her ideas for forging a new path in this field. Research demonstrates that we both ask too much of Holocaust education and do not have a coherent definition of it is a ‘subject’ or ‘field’, and yet we treat it as if it is distinct from other school disciplines. It is both a space for learning about the specific past that has been called ‘the Holocaust’ and laden with additional moral responsibilities unlike any other historical topic. In this respect it is also considered to be a subject which we must learn from to become better citizens, to enhance our ethical compass. The aims presented in the previous version of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s Recommendations for Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust (2019) make this clear: learn knowledge about the history preserve memory of the victims encourage and empower students to reflect on contemporary relevance. Many surveys have suggested that knowledge about the Holocaust is weak (https://www.claimscon.org/millennial-study/, https://www.claimscon.org/country-survey/, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/2021/nov/survey-exposes-lack-knowledge-about-holocaust), and [...]

By |2025-10-23T09:15:02+01:0023 October 2025|
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User testing the Digital Memory Database

Over the past five months, the Landecker Digital Memory Lab research team have been user testing our flagship resource – the Digital Memory Database – containing a collection of global digital Holocaust memory practice. By Dr. Kate Marrison and Dr. Ben Pelling In April 2025, the Digital Collective Memory Platform provided the perfect space for us to kick off a series of user testing sessions designed to test and gather feedback on the living-database archive. Joining online, trusted colleagues and friends working in the field of digital memory were the first to be introduced to the wire-framed version of the database in its alpha state. Listening to their feedback, we further developed the site (as discussed below) and our inaugural Connective Holocaust Commemoration Expo marked the official beta-launch where we showcased the database to a wide range of academics, educators, filmmakers, digital creatives and heritage professionals from more than 30 countries across the Middle East, Latin America, North America, Europe and Asia. This was immediately followed by a workshop at the biennial Max and Hilde Kochmann Summer School for PhD students in Modern European-Jewish History and Culture hosted by the Sussex Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies in cooperation with [...]

By |2025-10-09T09:04:21+01:009 October 2025|
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Spotlight: Gathering the Voices

by Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden Our Spotlight series takes a deep dive into the digital offerings of worldwide organisations dedicated to Holocaust memory. This week, Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden looks at how the community association Gathering the Voices has used digital media to present testimonies of survivors with connections to Scotland, and to enable students to learn about their experiences. As their first digital comic details, Gathering the Voices is a community association with six trustees, based in the Glasgow area. The trustees are three married couples, and the husband of each had at least one parent who experienced the Holocaust. It is a personal project, and the trustees have been able to collect c. 50 interviews because they had developed a substantial level of trust with many interviewees before the project started. It was initially established with a small grant from Sense Over Sectarianism and a gift of several audio recorders that were going to be thrown out by Glasgow Caledonian University (where one of the trustees worked). Since then, the trustees have done immense work to apply for further funding, receiving support from the Heritage Fund which needed to be matched. Nevertheless, it is mostly sustained by a [...]

By |2025-10-03T12:04:22+01:002 October 2025|
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Reflections from the Memory Studies Association Conference, Prague

The research team of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab recently attended the Memory Studies Association’s annual conference, the world-leading event in the field, this year held across Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, Czechia. During the packed, five-day programme, the Lab contributed to five sessions and joined many others. Find out what we shared and learned from three distinct perspectives. By Dr. Ben Pelling, Dr. Kate Marrison and Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden Dr. Ben Pelling, Research Fellow, Landecker Digital Memory Lab: As someone new to memory studies, the size of MSA Prague was at first quite overwhelming, with more than 1,400 participants. However, this does mean that there are plenty of panel sessions, workshops, tours and other events to suit all areas of scholarship or mere curiosity. There was ample opportunity to sample sessions on topics diverse from one’s own research focus - a great way to learn about new methods and approaches that can be adopted and co-opted as needed or just enjoy the work of scholars studying a completely different topic. One thing I learned during the event was that memory scholars are starting to engage with online, digital and mapping resources in their [...]

By |2025-09-25T13:23:36+01:0025 September 2025|
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Surveying Global Digital Holocaust Memory Practice

By Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden We’re investigating how Holocaust museums, memorial sites, libraries, and educational organisations use digital media in their work. Find out how you can get involved in this week’s blog. Launched earlier this year, the digital Holocaust memory survey seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of digital practice and strategies across this global digital memoryscape. What Do We Want to Know? What type of digital projects are being created and have historically been created across the professional Holocaust education and memory sector What social media channels are used and to what extent accounts of professional organisations are confronted with denial, distortion and misinformation How/ if AI and machine learning are being used in Holocaust education and memory organisations How digital engagement is managed internally, from a strategic through to an operational level. Why? One of our core goals is to build digital literacies and capacities across the sector, and this survey will help us to identify key areas where professionals working in Holocaust museums, memorial sites, libraries and educational organisations (or what we refer in shorthand to as the ‘Holocaust memory sector’) need support. Our work is always informed by listening to rather the imposing findings on our [...]

By |2025-09-04T10:23:14+01:004 September 2025|
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Why We Shouldn’t Be Surprised about #AI #Auschwitz, and What We Can Do About It

By Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden Last week the BBC reported on spammers sharing ‘AI slop’ images of Auschwitz for profit. In this week’s blog, we respond to their article, reflecting on our years of research into Holocaust memory and AI. On Friday 29th August, the BBC published an article with the headline: ‘BBC reveals web of spammers profiting from AI Holocaust images.’ Whilst this might seem shocking, it shouldn’t be, and far from ‘spamming’, which can be considered a flippant action, the individuals involved in these profit-making schemes are using social media in conscious and sophisticated ways – as its logics intend it to be used. This should make us stop and ask: are platforms like Facebook good for Holocaust memory? On one hand, it would be easy (especially in the current political climate) to say, ‘not really’. On the other hand, if Holocaust museums and educational organisations want their authority to remain recognised widely, they need to be not only be present on these sites but enhance their visibility. As our previous research has argued (Walden 2021), professional Holocaust organisations need to adopt the strategies of apparent ‘bad actors’ if they want their messages to circulate as much as [...]

By |2025-09-02T13:32:24+01:002 September 2025|
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Building a Living Database, Part 1: Mapping the World’s Digital Holocaust Memory Projects 

By Dr Kate Marrison, Research Fellow, Landecker Digital Memory Lab Today the Landecker Digital Memory Lab launches its digital map of global Holocaust memory, coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Research Fellow Dr Kate Marrison sets out its ambitious aims.   This year marks a major milestone anniversary – 80 years since the end of the Second World War and thus, (more than) eight decades since the liberation of the camps. The UK Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s theme for International Holocaust Remembrance Day,  ‘For a Better Future’ feels particularly pertinent as the Holocaust moves from an event in living history to forms of “mediated memory” (Young, 2000). Aligned with the Landecker Digital Memory Lab’s central mission of “ensuring a sustainable future for Holocaust memory in the digital age”, this moment offers an opportunity to look ahead and think critically about the possibilities of our digital futures. So, what does digital memory practice look like today and how might it shape Holocaust memory going forward? Listening across sectors  After listening to more than 120 memory professionals, tech practitioners, educators, designers, curators, creatives and academics working in this field, we observed that the current digital Holocaust memoryscape is [...]

By |2025-08-26T14:21:31+01:0015 April 2025|
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Behind the Scenes at the Lab: What’s in the Works?

It’s been an extremely busy start to the year at the Lab. Find out what we’ve been up to behind the scenes as we approach an exciting new phase of our programme. We kicked off 2025 by welcoming a new member of the team. Research Fellow Dr Ben Pelling has an academic background in History and his previous postdoctoral role focused on the impact of digitisation on conspiracy theories across Europe. Last month, he presented some work in progress related to our living database archive at the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab's Research Forum alongside some fascinating projects, including one about AI in music. Welcome Ben. We are very happy that you have joined the team. Holocaust Memorial Day Early February saw an excellent Holocaust Memorial Day programme hosted by University of Sussex, the first university in England to commemorate this annual event. Our Director Professor Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden took part in a discussion and Q&A with founder and president of the UK Jewish Film Festival Judy Ironside MBE focused on the screening of Letter to a Pig. The short film is an Oscar-nominated animation Letter to a Pig (watch the 'making of'), which explores a young girl's dream after listening to [...]

By |2025-08-01T09:59:04+01:0013 March 2025|
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Spotlight: Dachau Memorial

By Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden The Director of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab reflects on how digitally-mediated experiences of Dachau Memorial rearrange the site’s meaning and affect for her. On arrival at KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau, most visitors close the gate which reads ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ so they can take a photograph of the infamous slogan. There is no suggestion from the site’s curators or educators that this is a proposed activity at the site – indeed there is no invitation to ‘touch’ historical things (although the gate in-situ is a replica), yet most visitors feel compelled to do this – perhaps due to the iconicity of these three words. This now ritualistic behaviour is illustrative of the fact that however well ‘curated’ or ‘managed’ memorial sites seem to be, their role as memorial spaces and the meaning and relations relating to the past constructed there rely on the performativity of the multitude of different agents who come to occupy the place – however transiently. As I walked through the gate the first time during a 5-day research trip to the site, my eyes and thus my whole-bodily attention were draw to two things immediately: the guard tower across the roll call [...]

By |2025-02-26T17:26:23+00:0026 February 2025|
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Building the Lab – Part 3: Our Official Launch

by Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden, Director, Landecker Digital Memory Lab The Landecker Digital Memory has officially launched. To mark the pivotal moment, we held an event in London in front of a distinguished audience of academics, policymakers, Holocaust memorial sites and museums, educators, journalists, filmmakers, digital media creatives, politicians and Holocaust survivors and their descendants. After months of hard work establishing our team, aims, values, and starting to build the initiatives we are launching in 2025 and beyond, the Landecker Digital Memory Lab officially launched this week at the Imperial War Museum in London. We felt a real buzz in the room as attendees enjoyed a drinks reception, an exclusive review of our forthcoming policy guidance on AI and Holocaust memory, and had the opportunity to preview some of our walkthrough videos ahead of the launch next year of our living database-archive. All of our guests were invited to an ‘after hours’ private viewing of the Imperial War Museum’s award-winning Holocaust Galleries, following a fascinating introduction by its curator and the Museum’s Head of Public History, Dr James Bulgin. As I introduced our plans for the next five years, we were joined by an audience of more than 150 people [...]

By |2024-11-22T10:17:52+00:0022 November 2024|
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Contact

Landecker Digital Memory Lab
University of Sussex
Falmer Campus
Brighton and Hove
East Sussex
BN1 9RH
LandeckerDigitalMemoryLab@sussex.ac.uk

Contact

Landecker Digital Memory Lab
University of Sussex
Falmer Campus
Brighton and Hove
East Sussex
BN1 9RH
LandeckerDigitalMemoryLab@sussex.ac.uk

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