Abstract
Education plays a crucial role in processes of state building and identity formation and therefore has the potential to influence the construction of cultural memory. This holds particularly true for education on difficult pasts, including famines. This chapter comparatively investigates how national periods of hunger are currently (2010–2021) integrated in secondary education in four European countries that share a comparable traumatic famine past: Germany, Spain, Ireland, and the Netherlands. We comparatively analyse textbooks geared to different levels of secondary education that offer education on hunger experiences. Through an exploration of victim-perpetrator discourses as well as common tropes and representations, we focus on the narrativisation of past periods of hunger. Additionally, we examine the results of teacher surveys from different national contexts on educational practices related to hunger education in order to compare and contrast our textbook analyses with teachers’ experiences. We argue that a transnational approach, which not only considers historical hunger periods in a comparative light but also connects hunger pasts to current-day global challenges, is still largely absent. Integrating these transnational, diachronic perspectives into educational practices would provide an important pathway to ensure the engagement of students with both history and society today.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Famines and the Making of Heritage |
| Editors | Marguérite Corporaal, Ingrid de Zwarte |
| Place of Publication | London |
| Pages | 21-43 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781003391524 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2024 |
Keywords
- Famine
- Education
- Hunger
- Germany