This project examines visitor engagement with an interactive, multimodal exhibition that explores the role of photography in mediating the public understanding of the Holocaust. It builds on the success of the AHRC funded project 'Photography as Political Practice in National Socialism' (2018-21), which explored how photography, which was widely used in Nazi propaganda, has distorted the ways we perceive victims of the Holocaust today. The project also unearthed how people persecuted by the Nazi regime deployed photography to record counter-narratives, thus creating a rich visual resource, which is, however, largely unknown to modern audiences. These insights have informed a national touring exhibition 'The Eye as Witness: Recording the Holocaust', which will allow us to test new methods for exhibiting these sources. This Follow-on Funding project is designed to enhance the significant social and cultural impacts of the project by capitalising on the unforeseen yet invaluable opportunity provided by the exhibition's tour: to observe and evaluate audience responses, thus generating evidence of the effectiveness of our various interventions in reaching contemporary audiences. The aim is to inform future curatorial, pedagogical and policy practices around the use of photography in Holocaust memorialisation and learning. The project takes place against a backdrop of rising racially-motivated hate crimes, Anti-Semitism, and a decline in public knowledge about the Holocaust. This political context means that gathering information regarding public understanding of these issues is both timely and urgent. Our hypothesis is that public understanding is currently compromised by a one-sided reliance on perpetrator-made images when imagining the Holocaust today. While these images engage audiences emotionally, they also perpetuate harmful stereotypes. This follow-on funding allows us to ascertain whether different curatorial interventions can help audiences to view photographs of the Holocaust more critically. In our exhibition, visitors enter an immersive Mixed Reality experience which allows them to explore a classical perpetrator image of the Holocaust, sharpening their awareness of the perspective, framing and selection at work in the image. They then encounter alternative images produced by victims of Nazi persecution, which are very rarely seen in exhibitions or online. Interactive display screens invite visitors to record their own reflections and to apply lessons learnt from the exhibition to photographs of violence, atrocities and mass migration in the world today. A purpose-made artistic video installation provides the opportunity for us to explore the effectiveness of artistic interventions in supporting historical and technological displays. This project comprises detailed visitor observation, questionnaires and interviews in all five venues hosting the exhibition: the Imperial War Museum North (Manchester); the Bradford Peace Museum; the National Memorial Arboretum (Staffordshire); the Djanogly Art Gallery (Nottingham), and one London venue tbc. Our project is ground-breaking in combining established qualitative methods of museum audience research with innovations from digital humanities approaches. This includes technological observation through gaze, eye and movement tracking in our Mixed Reality headsets, and digitally recording choices visitors make about photographs on interactive touch screens. The resulting evidence will demonstrate the effects of our interventions on different demographics, empowering museums to make optimal use of our research for future displays. Our testing the effectiveness of digital interventions will also inform museums about the potential of new technologies to engage visitors with other difficult subjects in the future, and to minimise harmful side-effects when displaying problematic images.

This network examines the role of culture in societies that are seeking to come to terms with traumatic pasts. In such societies culture is one medium through which individuals and groups present their experiences to a broad public as a form of testimony. We understand cultural forms of testimony to include autobiographical accounts, novels, diaries, letters, memoirs, films, theatre, works of art, and documentaries. The network explores how cultural testimony can enrich public debate about past and present injustice, but it also explores how it is instrumentalised for narrow political purposes. The network is innovative because it brings together researchers from the fields of history, political science and international relations, law, sociology, and those working on culture, literature, film and museums in a variety of national and transnational contexts. Researchers also work alongside practitioners who are core members of the network. These include a novelist, documentary theatre company, representatives from the National Holocaust Centre and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, members of expert commissions, and teachers. We are primarily concerned with cultural testimony and the ways in which it is received and put to use. Of particular interest is the role that it can play in overcoming divisions in societies marked by war, genocide and authoritarian rule. The writing and recording of testimony in a range of forms play an increasingly significant role in civil society initiatives that seek to establish the norms for justice that are not restricted to legal procedures. This is seen most markedly in efforts to conserve and transmit memory of the Holocaust for and to future generations, for example the extensive use of eyewitness testimony at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. These approaches to remembering the victims of National Socialism and fascism are drawn upon in cultural responses to authoritarianism across the globe. The network members and their case studies come from diverse cultural contexts in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Romania, Albania, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Argentina, South Africa and Rwanda. The network thus provides opportunities for scholars with different understandings of testimony to collaborate and to produce new insights into how culture functions as testimony as societies attempt to come to terms with their past. As the production of testimony in cultural forms is a global phenomenon, international collaboration is a core part of the network. This is also reflected in the constitution of the network's steering group. The network establishes why victims, perpetrators and memory activists turn to first person forms of expression as they strive for justice and reconciliation. Used thoughtfully, the testimony of culturally complex sources can open up new directions for research that cut across generalisations about the past and simplistic divisions of the population into perpetrators and victims. Used in a fragmentary, unreflective or tendentious manner, this same testimony can be hijacked to support pre-existing political positions. In the 'age of the eyewitness' (Wieviorka, 2006) the network identifies the particular characteristics of culture as testimony, and it discusses how we can analyse and benefit from these sources. The network's three workshops on the range and function of testimony in cultural forms, methodological approaches to the use of cultural forms of testimony in understanding the past, and the politics of culture as testimony are followed by a high-profile international conference. The research is further disseminated via a network website and linked social media, two half-day schools' workshops, teaching materials, and publications including an interdisciplinary handbook on Culture and its Uses as Testimony.

This project represents phase 1 of a larger project that will ultimately lead to the development of distinctive new cultural products - the immersive, interactive, spatial archives based on 360 degree photography and sound recording that we term 'virtual Holocaust memoryscapes' (or VHMs) - and associated research agendas. Working with Nazi concentration camp memorial sites, Holocaust education organisations and cutting-edge creative technology companies, in phase 1 a multidisciplinary team of academics from the UK and the USA will explore how VHMs can be used to connect significant Holocaust landscapes - in the first instance, the former Nazi concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen and Neuengamme - with relevant visual, written and audio content such as films, photographs, diaries, artworks, oral testimonies and historical documents. We will also explore the possibility of using Geographic Information System (GIS) data to create mobile versions of these immersive experiences based on a user's geographic location. By enabling users to encounter diverse archives by way of virtual environments based on recordings of present day memorial sites, VHMs will facilitate interactions with the hidden histories of camps such as Bergen-Belsen, where few physical traces of the genocide remain. When encountered through a VR headset or similar, VHMs will allow members of the public to experience new forms of Holocaust memory that are location-specific, immersive and multisensory, meaning that they come to experience what we term a 'virtual memory' of the Holocaust through affect and the body, as well as the intellect. The project is timely, responding to the fact that we are drawing towards the end of the historical period in which people still have living memories of the Holocaust, yet recognising that new forms of immersive technology are increasingly being used to transform the public understanding of the genocide. Our non-academic partners - who include the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the UK's National Holocaust Centre and Museum, as well as the memorial sites at Bergen-Belsen and Neuengamme (Germany) and Westerbork (Netherlands) - have been at the forefront of the development of the first generation of digital memory projects, including VR films and 'interactive testimony' where members of the public can hold a virtual conversation with a recording of a Holocaust survivor using natural language processing. By engaging with these partners across three workshops in the UK and Germany, we will scope phase 2 of the Virtual Holocaust Memoryscapes project, putting together a multidisciplinary, multinational, multi-sector team for a practical development phase that will go hand in hand with the publication of connected research outputs. By using technology in a nuanced and reflective fashion to deepen the public understanding of Holocaust landscapes, we will ensure that Holocaust memory remains relevant for future generations in the post-survivor era. Ultimately, we aim to create a diverse portfolio of VHMs - potentially widening to include the sites of former Nazi extermination camps in Poland and landscapes associated with other historical atrocities - working with museum and education partners around the world to ensure that these historically significant locations are made available to socially and geographically diverse communities.

This programme of knowledge exchange, dissemination, and the production of an exhibition and teaching resources draws on the findings of the AHRC major research project 'From Victims to Perpetrators? Discourses of German Wartime Suffering' (2005-2008). In that project, the complex interaction of narratives of victimhood and perpetration from the end of WWII into the 21st century was established: tropes associated with the Holocaust were found to have been instrumentalised within German accounts of what they had endured as the victims of Allied bombing, mass rapes, and expulsion, even as German complicity in Jewish suffering and Jewish suffering itself were marginalised. We also discovered, however, that more nuanced narratives have emerged since the mid-1990s. These aim for an inclusive juxtaposition of the complexities, and ambiguities, of the experiences of individual Germans and Jews while remaining mindful of how such a juxtaposition might appear to relativise German responsibility or Jewish suffering. Such narratives raise productive questions within today's globalisation of Holocaust memory as a model for coming-to-terms with injustices far removed from the concentration camps. Specifically, recent German fiction, film and memorials raise questions relating to 1) the possibility of empathy with 'ordinary' Germans; 2) the balance between recognising the ordinary German's 'absolute' victimhood (e.g. that he or she was bombed) and the need to set this suffering in the context of how Germans benefited from the racial state's exploitation and elimination of others; and (3) how opposing perspectives might be sensitively juxtaposed and so be able to generate inclusivity and dialogue without a blurring of historical accountability. These questions resonate in the post-apartheid South African context. Working with The SA Holocaust and Genocide Foundation (SAHGF), we aim to adapt our research findings to intervene productively in SA's efforts to confront the legacy of apartheid and, specifically, to contribute to the SAHGF's educational outreach with SA schools. The primary outcome will be a travelling exhibition for the SAHGF centres in Cape Town, Jo'burg and Durban documenting Germany's coming-to-terms with its past and prompting visiting school groups (and the public) to rethink their SA context, i.e. how can we square historical justice with reconciliation; how are the experiences of all groups to be narrated without relativisation? Our research on Germany suggests that posing these questions within agreed parameters (i.e. accountability remains vital) can in itself open up a difficult past to democratic debate. We will also stage public events in both SA and the UK. In Cape Town, we will organise workshops at the SAHGF for pupils and the general public to mark the launch of the exhibition and to prompt wider discussion of its contemporary relevance. The UK High Commission in SA and the British Council will also be involved. In the UK, we will work with the Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre (Notts) to set the exhibition into a new context; we will launch the UK exhibition, with SAHGF and Beth Shalom staff, at events to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2015 and Beth Shalom's 20th anniversary. In addition, we will collaborate with Leeds City Council and a Leeds theatre company on a three-month drama workshop for young people, based on the exhibition. At 3 performances and after-show discussions, we will engage city residents, with SAHGF and Beth Shalom staff, on 'global traumas' and their local significance. Finally, we will work with Beth Shalom to create teaching resources designed to deepen pupils' grasp of traumatic pasts and today's debates on historical accountability, racism and social exclusion. These materials, downloadable from the project website, will benefit pupils across a range of disciplines, in the UK and globally. We will also offer CPD opportunities for a postdoc and staff at our partner institutions.

This programme of knowledge exchange, co-production, and public outreach draws on the findings of the AHRC major research project 'From Perpetrators to Victims? Discourses of German Wartime Suffering' (2005-2008). In that project, Taberner and Cooke established a more nuanced narrative of the German experience of confronting the Holocaust since 1945 than had previously been available in the scholarly literature. We identified a dialectic between Germans' desire -- varying in intensity over the decades -- to repress the past and Germans' efforts to face up to the crimes that had been committed in their name, and we evidenced the way in which German debates on German wartime suffering (the bombing of German cities, the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, the mass rapes of German women, etc.) were never distinct from debates on the country's historical responsibility for the Holocaust but were always implicit within them, and vice versa. Further to this, we traced the way in which the German confrontation with the Holocaust has in recent years come to be seen as a model for how other nations, globally, can confront other dark pasts, for example, slavery, colonialism, apartheid, recent genocidal massacres such as Rwanda in 1994, and dictatorship in South America. We discovered that the German experience of confronting the Holocaust is 'usable' in these contexts precisely because it (often even ambivalently) provokes reflection on issues of 'owning up to the past', apology, reparation, restitution, and the difficult balance to be struck between understanding and condemnation. Our follow-on impact project aims to use stimulus materials drawn from the original research -- historical images of key moments when Germans were forced to confront the crimes committed in their name, and original films -- as the basis for a series of four workshops with a writer (Anthony Haddon, of the Theatre Company Blah Blah Blah), the director and dance tutor at RJC Dance (the leading Black dance organisation in the North of England), and RJC's young dancers, who mostly come from a Black background. Following this period of knowledge exchange in December 2015 and January 2016, we will work with the writer, director and dance tutor to co-produce a dance performance for the RJC's Youth Division. The performance will translate the historical images and films used as stimulus materials -- and the issues of confrontation with the past, silence and denial, acceptance and reparation that the images reveal -- into a dance performance. This dance performance will be rehearsed over three months from January 2015 to April 2016. It will then be staged at the University of Leeds in late April at two twilight performances for students and pupils from local schools, with a third performance at The UK National Holocaust Centre. Two student interns from the University of Leeds will also be involved in the workshops, creative process, and performances, and highlights of our engagement with partners and of the performances will be filmed. In May 2016, the final month of the project, a post-production workshop will take place and a short film will be edited and released as a record of the different interactions and engagements that have taken place. Our aims are: 1) to engage new audiences, and young Black people in particular, with the Holocaust and the German experience of confronting the Holocaust; 2) to produce an original piece of dance performance based on our research and our collaboration with a Black dance organisation; 3) to encourage Black audiences -- but also other diverse audiences at the University of Leeds performances and at the UK National Holocaust Centre -- to reflect on the relevance of the German experience of confronting the Holocaust for other forms of prejudice; 4) to record our work, to provide researchers, educationalists and teachers, and interested organisations with a model that can be developed further.