Summer School: Cultural trauma and National Identity in Greece and Israel

CANCELLED DUE TO CORONOVAIRUS CRISIS - SEE YOU ALL IN 2021 - SAME DATES, SAME SPEAKERS!

2020, Agia Paraskevi, Lesvos island (20-26 August)

The summer school explores the ways cultural trauma(s) have shaped, and continue to effect national identity in Greece and Israel. It explores the ways such cultural traumas have shaped civic religion and national narrative, as well as more fluid and reflective public discourses, historical, literary, artistic or otherwise. It examines the above as a constant flow of discourses, narratives, myths and performances which struggle to keep meaningful established national myths of suffering and sacrifice, or to challenge those myths by providing new meaning to past events. The summer school explores the material and non-material resources mobilized to this effect, the script and collective representations, as well as the social forces and the audiences which participate and shape cultural traumas and the public sphere. Three further questions emerge out of such analysis:

How do these certainties and debates shape public sentiment and processes of political representation? 

How do they influence international relations and foreign policy? And,  

How do they affect perceptions of threat, and of friend and foe, and thus how do they affect national security?