Historical borders and maps as symbolic supports to master narratives and history education (original) (raw)
Related papers
Boundaries as a topic in geographic education
Political Geography, 1993
The educational system works to influence ideology and determine beliefs and values transmitted in the socialization process. This paper examines the way in which Zionist ideology has used the discipline of geography to create certain beliefs relating to the boundaries of the territory from the beginning of the century until the present day. The means by which the ideas and beliefs were transmitted were through curricula and textbooks prepared for the highly centralized educational system in Israel. The findings show that the educational system has transmitted dual and confused messages on the question of Israel's boundaries. The presentation of borders is imprecise and indeterminate and there is a sophisticated avoidance of any discussion of this value-loaded question. The relations between ideology-power-knowledge in Zionism have produced a situation in which Israeli citizens of the present acquired political beliefs in the past from which each has built his/her 'mental map'. These maps will influence their decisions at the ballot box on the question of the future borders of the state.
Maps and the Teaching of Latin American History - HAHR 92.2 (2012): 213-244
Hisapanic American Historical Review, 2012
Historical maps deserve a place in the college classroom as primary sources. Since the 1980s, scholarship has shown how maps can be analyzed and interpreted to reveal something not only about the peoples, spaces, and times they portray but also about the societies that create, consume, and contest them. Over the last decade, the maps themselves have become increasingly accessible, as important research libraries and archives digitize their holdings. Yet these graphic texts are not yet staples of college curricula or documentary readers. This essay provides a brief overview of recent research in the history of cartography and presents two examples of map discussion modules for the Latin American history classroom: a demonstration of US neocolonialism, resource extraction, and social change in late nineteenth-century eastern Nicaragua, and a case of urban planning and ideas of order in colonial Mexico City.
On Borders and Memories. Introduction
Borders and Memories. Conflicts and Co-operation in European Border Regions, 2019
The article deals with European border regions that have experienced numerous changes over the 20th century. Because of this changeable, frequently painful past, different human stories – mostly tragic or romanticized – individual and collective memories, mythologies with heroes, and divergent perceptions of history developed.
Art and cartography as a critique of borders
ICC 2017: Proceedings of the 2017 International Cartographic Conference, 2017
This study focuses on the relationship between art and cartography. The main objective is to analyze how contemporary art uses maps to criticize borders. Inspired by the arguments raised by the Critical Cartography against the false neutrality of maps, we emphasize the potential of artworks to communicate different insights about how we experience and live the contemporary space. In that sense, art plays an important role not only to discuss the articulation of power and knowledge in cartography, but also to propose other categories of thought. Considering that borders are one of the most relevant visual elements on a map, we propose the following question: how the intersection between art and cartography can improve the critical thinking about borders? By questioning borders, art underlines that physical world is characterized by liminal spaces, not by absolute or strict separations. We briefly analyzed some examples of artworks that deal with political issues regarding this topic. Our findings suggest that art could reveal the impact of imposing borders in a space, whose arbitrary delimitation reflects power relations.
Teaching Borders: A Model Arising from Israeli Geography Education
2021
Teaching the topic of a country’s borders can be challenging. This is especially the case in Israel, where not all the state’s borders are agreed: there are internal disagreements between parties on the ground and external disagreements between parts of the international community and the State of Israel. A border, the very symbol of stability and consistency, contains mixed and contradictory aspects; the borders are not always well defined and, for many people, sensitive and contentious subjects. Therefore, teachers often avoid or feel uncomfortable teaching the topic, even though they know well its importance. This study examines existing curricula and textbooks used to teach the topic in Israeli high schools, and develops a picture of teachers’ perceptions of teaching the topic through qualitative research. On this basis, the paper proposes a training model that addresses both the social and emotional side of the subject and the historical and political knowledge required to teac...
Presentation at the webinar Shaping Identity of Georgia: Museums, Maps and Monuments organized by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University on 2 March, 2023, 2023
The below presentation explains the importance of using historical maps in teaching history, especially the under-studied history of such countries as Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine. It also explains the harm that may be caused by pseudo-historical maps distorting the real history which appear on the web in the absence of high-quality historical maps.
Biblio details: (pp 113-138). 2010. Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society. No 1, Spring. Abstract • School history atlases are used almost exclusively as required textbooks in Central and Eastern Europe, where the model of the ethnolinguistic nation-state rules supreme. My hypothesis is that these atlases are used in this region because a graphic presentation of the past makes it possible for students to grasp the idea of the presumably “natural” or “inescapable” overlapping of historical, linguistic, and demographic borders, the striving for which produced the present-day ethnolinguistic nation-states. Conversely, school history atlases provide a framework to indoctrinate the student with the beliefs that ethnolinguistic nationalism is the sole correct kind of nationalism, and that the neighboring polities have time and again unjustly denied the “true and natural” frontiers to the student’s nation-state. Keywords • Central and Eastern Europe, ethnolinguistic nationalism, school history atlases
Journal of Women's History, 2006
The article seeks to supplant the idea of the "border" with that of "historical catachresis." The metaphor of the border intimates that space is a given, and that our job as historians is to step beyond prior marked places and reveal the existence of previously undisclosed or better ones. This concept of the border, proposed and discussed at the Berkshire Conference under the title "Sin Fronteras: Women's Histories, Global Conversations" in June 2005, places conceptual limits on thinking. This is most obvious in the case of ambiguous historical entities like colonialism, gender, or specific sign-systems. The concept of the historical catachresis, on the other hand, opens ways to read everyday evidence for experiences of incremental economic change, or commercial revolution, or new categories of sexuality, to name a few. Using the optic of the historical catachresis, and reading anachronistic images like a beautiful Bu'nei'men fertilizer woman image or the Nakayama Taiyodo colonial cosmetics company "girl," historians can enter into a contemporaneous moment. The article finally clarifies why older work on Chinese semicolonialism has been primarily reactive. It suggests that reading banal, ephemeral evidence for the emergence of new singularities or radically unprecedented experiences has the capacity to recast our conventional historians' questions of context, subjectivity, experience, and representation.