Understanding Atrocities Conference: Remembering, Representing and Teaching Genocide

Understanding Atrocities: Remembering, Representing and Teaching Genocide was a three-day international multidisciplinary conference, hosted by Mount Royal University in Calgary on February 19-21, 2014. The conference brought together leading experts, emerging and established scholars in the field of genocide studies, as well as undergraduate and graduate students, secondary school teachers, community members, and policy makers in order to share new scholarship and new teaching perspectives on the global, transhistorical problem of genocide. The conference was inspired by the goal of creating a forum bridging scholarly and community-based efforts to understand genocide, thereby augmenting the important specialised contributions of academic scholarship with insights and perspectives from teachers, members of non-profit groups interested in peace and conflict studies, members of aboriginal communities, and other interested members of civil society. Concerned with the automatic – and often, therefore, unexamined – identification of genocide with atrocity, our aim was to investigate how this historic relationship frames and complicates possibilities for understanding and prevention. To that end, the conference facilitated valuable exchanges of knowledge among scholars in the social sciences and humanities, as well as establishing productive new connections between academics and those outside the academy, leading to the identification of new research paths and the generation of new knowledge.