#VoteWithMemory Digital Campaign

In June 2024, millions of citizens will have the opportunity to participate in the European Parliament election. Voting represents the most direct way of influencing the composition of the European institution and, therefore, the future of the region and its role in the most pressing global challenges–including escalating conflicts, the polarisation of our societies, the climate crisis, human rights violations, and persistent economic inequalities.

In this context, ICSC-Europe has launched the #VoteWithMemory digital campaign. The initiative highlights the importance of learning from Europe’s historical past to better address current crises and avoid their escalation and repetition. Read the open letter and join the campaign.

European Symposium: Challenging Narratives, Fostering Empowerment and Collaborative Practice

ICSC-Europe, National Museums Liverpool (NML) and the Transatlantic Slavery and Legacies in Museums Forum (TSLMF) will be hosting the European symposium Challenging Narratives, Fostering Empowerment and Collaborative Practice from June 20-21, 2024, in Liverpool (UK).

The day-long symposium will provide participants a space to reflect on and engage in a peer-to-peer exchange on the specific role that museums and heritage sites play as agents of social transformation, challenging inherently discriminatory narratives, and building empowering and equitable community partnerships. The following day, on June 21, 2024, ICSC-Europe, in collaboration with the National Museums Liverpool (NML), will provide a half-day capacity-building workshop based on ICSC’s Correcting the Record methodology that supports Sites of Conscience and like-minded organizations expand their social impact by establishing new organizational approaches and practices.

Lilliput Plus: Transforming Sites of Conscience into Dynamic Spaces for Civic Engagement

Implemented in 2022, the Lilliput Plus project was an initiative of the multidisciplinary Lilliput Network and ICSC-Europe to pilot and systematize a new methodology for European historic museums and cultural centers to more effectively engage families in their programming. The project, awarded under the Erasmus + KA210-ADU – Small-scale partnerships in adult education funding line, helped advance ICSC-Europe’s mission to activate the role of historic museums, transforming them into dynamic spaces for civic engagement and active participation. From March to October 2022, three European Sites of Conscience–Istituzione Musei del Mare e delle Migrazioni (MuMA) in Italy, the War Childhood Museum in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Our Lord in the Attic in The Netherlands–tested the methodology to effectively engage families and children in exploring their exhibits through tailored content. The knowledge gained from this approach was shared at “Museums and Families for Change,” an international workshop held in Genoa, Italy. The workshop brought together representatives of more than 25 European historic museums and cultural centers, and family education experts to enhance the role of historic museums as spaces for critical thinking in society. Learnings and best practices were shared at a dissemination event on October 25, 2023.

MEMENTOES: Developing Video Games for Museums to Foster Empathy Around Sensitive Topics

ICSC-Europe was invited to join the Ethics Advisory Board (EAB) of the MEMENTOES project, which aims to create video games inspired by the real-life experiences of those who have lived through monumental historical events, and derive a set of guidelines for the effective design of high-quality, empathy-inducing digital games around sensitive topics. Awarded under Horizon Europe, the project supports the development of three video games created in collaboration with three of ICSC-Europe’s members, the War Childhood Museum (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Le Bois du Cazier (Belgium) and Gulag.cz (Czech Republic). The goal is to create an authentic digital storytelling platform that draws upon the experiences of real people and historical events to fulfill the museum’s responsibility to provide immersive, personal and transformative experiences that foster empathy toward the represented communities. While the technology used for the project can help advance valuable issues surrounding history, remembrance, representation and transitional justice, it also presents risks related to ethical principles, data protection requirements and its appropriation by groups seeking to promote harmful and divisive messages. The project’s Ethics Advisory Board is working over a period of three years to advise on these emerging ethical, privacy and social challenges.

Supporting CSOs Working on Conflict Transformation in the Balkans

From June 5-22, 2023, ICSC-Europe partnered with the Bloody Sunday Trust to hold a six-day international seminar on conflict transformation in Derry, Northern Ireland. The seminar brought together eight civil society organizations from the Balkans to explore how the “Derry Model” and the Northern Ireland experience can support and expand their work and practice fostering truth, justice and lasting peace in the region. Through researchers’ and practitioners’ presentations as well as first-hand actors’ sharing of experience, participants explored community-based truth-seeking processes and victim-driven advocacy efforts in the Northern Ireland context, including challenges and opportunities in building and maintaining lasting peace at community levels. After four intensive days of meetings and rich discussions, participants identified key priorities in moving forward peace-building and reconciliation in the Balkans. These are currently being incorporated into a proposal for a more expansive project that will support civil society actors to expand their work in the Balkans region by developing and testing new approaches to engage local leaders (religious leaders, politicians, former combatants) in effective peacebuilding and reconciliation through participatory action research.

Combating Hate Speech and Discriminatory Discourse in MENA region

ICSC-Europe and the Hrant Dink Foundation (HDF), a Site of Conscience in Turkey, have partnered to support the implementation of Utilizing Digital Technology for Social Cohesion, Positive Messaging and Peace by Boosting Collaboration, Exchange and Solidarity, a multilayered project aimed to promote peace and reduce discrimination in digital spaces in the Middle
East and North Africa (MENA) region, using emerging technologies. The project, awarded to HDF by the European Union Delegation in Lebanon in December 2021, has engaged 23 Sites of Conscience and 16 youth in the MENA region in capacity building training to strengthen their abilities to monitor, document and raise awareness about hate speech. As a result of this project, six Sites of Conscience and youth representatives from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen launched an awareness campaign for World Refugee Day on June 20, 2023.

Reshaping Harmful Narratives around Migration and Forced Displacement

ICSC-Europe supports the work of European migration museums in harnessing the power of their interconnected transgenerational narratives and resources to transform individual stories of migration and forced displacement into inclusive, collective memories that can bring new dimensions to these experiences. With that in mind, ICSC, ICSC-Europe and the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (France) partnered to host the Sharing Museums Symposium, a global meeting of 40 museums, artists and heritage professionals from around the world to exchange inclusive heritage and museum practices; analyze the challenges faced by migration museums today; identify gaps in the representation of migration in museums; and collectively devise approaches to correct these records to foster more inclusive and equitable narratives.

Best Practices in World War II Heritage and Youth Engagement

To highlight best practices and deepen the role of Sites of Conscience and heritage sites in the promotion of more inclusive narratives and the countering of revisionist narratives of World War II, in July 2022, ICSC-Europe and the Institute of International Studies at Seoul National University brought together representatives of Sites of Conscience and other cultural and heritage sites that shared underrepresented narratives related to WWII, in order to amplify strategies to promote more inclusive histories for future generations; provide tools to counter historical revisionism; and offer platforms for youth to take leadership roles in continuing these vital conversations.