Diversity / Diversité / Diversität

The essays collected in this volume address a wide spectrum of issues connected to traumatic events and experiences, be they of personal, collective, national or global scale. They are complemented by poetic contemplations on trauma, which set the tone for the following scholarly investigations. The thematic scope of the collection encompasses psychological, sociological and political approaches to trauma, examples of ethnic and indigenous traumatizations, literary, cultural and visual manifestations of trauma or the medialization of trauma in the museum. As a result of the comparative, and in some cases cross-hermeneutic, design of the volume with German scholars looking at Canadian and Canadian scholars looking at German/European examples of traumatization, transatlantic perspectives on the problems at stake are opened.

Contributors:
Dennis Cooley (Winnipeg), Martin Endress (Trier), James Fergusson (Winnipeg), Konrad Gross (Kiel), Ralf Hertel (Trier), Kristin Husen (Trier), Stephan Jaeger (Winnipeg), Uli Jung (Trier), Wolfgang Klooss (Trier), Martin Kuester (Marburg), Hartmut Lutz (Greifswald), Wolfgang Lutz (Trier), Adam Muller (Winnipeg), Markus M. Müller (Trier), Laurie Ricou (Vancouver), Susanne Rohr (Hamburg), Robert Schwartzwald (Montréal), Struan Sinclair (Winnipeg), David Staines (Ottawa), Katherine E. Walton (Toronto), Andrew Woolford (Winnipeg).

The past few years in Canada have been marked by numerous events in the course of which Canadian Settlers were invited to reconsider their perspectives on, and practices toward the Indigenous population. Public schools are one of the main institutions directly invited to reflect on and challenge their own colonial legacy and ongoing colonial structures and practices. This project aims at better understanding how a K-12 Manitoba public-school and its Settler educators represent, reflect on, and practice their relationship to Indigeneity and to their Anishinaabe neighbors. It thus explores how Settlerness is constantly constructed, and how this takes shape in this public school, in the midst of the changing recognition of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. The research investigates structures of Settler dominations that were reproduced and disrupted in the school through changing practices.

How do diversity and memory mutually shape one another? This volume of the IRTG Diversity series shows that a focus on memory introduces an important and contested temporal dimension to the politics, practices, and narratives of diversity. Exploring the various entanglements of historical projections and representations of and from the past with contemporary discourses on difference and inclusion, the articles in this collection problematize memory in relationship to three (often overlapping) modes of storytelling: literature, ethno-biography, and historiography. From the construction of diasporic identities to family migration histories to the conflicted politics of remembering, memories shape diversity, be they in the form of shared memories, divided memories, or conflicting memories.