Centre for Media and Culture in Education

Since the mid-1990s faculty and graduate students associated with the Testimony and Historical Memory Project in the Centre for Media and Culture in Education at OISE/UT have studied various ways the past might become significant in contemporary daily life. Rather than only responding to the question of what we must remember in order to be, the Testimony and Historical Memory Project is considering what it means, in light of the experience of the past, to be what we are now, and perhaps more significantly, how we might be in future. Most recently, project work has focused on the practice of public history in the context of museum exhibitions addressing “difficult knowledge” regarding acts of mass systemic violence. Led by Professors Roger Simon and Lynne Teather, members of the THM Project are now completing a comparative study of various exhibitions that have differently presented images from an archival collection of photographs taken at lynchings in the United States between 1880 and 1960.