Maria Mendel (University of Gdańsk, Poland)
Monuments and the educational importance of the fragmentum

5.30-7.00 pm

This will be an online meeting via Zoom (link below), but Room 903 will be available for those wishing to gather for the occasion.
 
Based on several Gdańsk cases, I will speak of the educational importance of monuments. Linking inquiries about the term fragmentum and the concept of semiophore developed by Krzysztof Pomian, I argue that the monument is formative as both visible (material thing) and invisible (a semiophore with spectral remnants behind the thing and its meanings). As such the monument represents fragments, in Latin ‘cracks’, as expression of violence inflicted on an intact, because imaginary whole. Monuments work educatively when, like Derrida’s spectres, they return to do justice, but are still doomed to non-fulfilment.
 
Maria Mendel is professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Gdansk, and chair of the Department of Social Pedagogy. She also teaches in a doctoral programme at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk. Her work focuses particularly on relations between subjectivity, memory and space, which are important in light of the current fractures between subjective lives and politics. Recent articles include: ‘The spatial ways democracy works: On the pedagogy of common places. Why, why now?’ Research in Education. 2019;103(1):5-18; ‘On the haunted “publici=” in public education in Poland’. EERJ. April 2021.
  
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81813506541
Meeting ID: 818 1350 6541
 
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