Call for Submissions on Digital Testimony

Call for Submissions (Research & Articles)
ASSERT Special ISSUE – Teaching with Digital Testimony
This special issue of ASSERT explores the rise of digital first-person testimony – particularly using cutting edge technology - as a tool for social studies teachers with significant potential but also substantial challenges. First-person testimony is not just about what happened but helps us understand how an event was experienced, how it is remembered, how those memories are preserved for future generations, and has us ask: “what kind of shadow does the past cast over the present?” (Assmann, 2006, p.263).

The Holocaust provides one of the most extensive and well-documented attempts to digitize testimony and use it for educational purposes. The use of testimony in education became more prominent and accepted as survivors emerged from the shadow of the Holocaust to share their personal stories with secondary students and as survivor stories became preserved in digital form through the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University and the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California, among other efforts. The growth of first-person testimony as a legitimate and powerful tool in Holocaust and genocide education generated scholarship and debates about the difference between history and memory (Baquero, 2021), the reliability and purpose of first-person testimony in education, the role of testimony in historiography (Baquero, 2021), pedagogical practices with testimony, the tension with testimony as on the one hand being necessary but at the same time “the impossibility of fully bearing witness to this particular traumatic past” (Hirsch and Spitzer, 2009, p.152), debates about the purposes and limitations of Holocaust and genocide education more broadly (Haas, 2020), and other disciplinary, ethical, and educational issues.

We are now entering the “post-survivor era” (Michlic, 2017, p.xxvii) where the Holocaust will move from ‘‘contemporary history’’ to ‘‘remote history.’’ (Assmann, 2006, p.271). The loss of Holocaust survivors who can testify, combined with new technologies and an online environment that dominates daily life, provides new educational opportunities and significant dangers. Classroom visits by survivors were the exception, but the digitization of survivors provides much wider access and expands the range of events that can be explored beyond the Holocaust. While the Holocaust has been the focal point of much preservation of testimony and scholarship, there is an expanding availability of digital testimony provided by museums, universities, and other organizations. Some testimony is still in traditional video format while other testimony is interactive and uses augmented and virtual reality. Just a few examples include the Genocide Archives of Rwanda, the US Veterans History Project, VR testimony from survivors of sexual assault, Oral testimony from 9/11, testimony from displaced Palestinians, and testimonies from the Armenian Genocide, Nanjing Massacres, and Spanish Civil War among many others. By digital testimony we include video, interactive digital representations, social media apps, and virtual reality programs. We are particularly interested in submissions focused on how emerging technology is changing the types of testimony available, what counts as testimony, the relationship between those giving testimony and the “audience,” and how this impacts educational practice.

Digital testimony, particularly with new technologies, creates pedagogical and ethical challenges. The rise of deepfake technology and manipulated images, video, and audio has us wondering whether in the near future people will believe any mediated testimony since it is more difficult than ever to distinguish fake voice and video from the real thing (Maiberg, 2017). What counts as truth in the digital environment? There are also challenges in the shift from live to digital testimony as testimony enters the public domain and cannot be controlled (Schwartzman, 2020) and as testimony can become “ossified as a static monument” (Schwartzman, 2020, p.68) stuck in the time during which it was recorded/created. Finally, there is a lack of rigorous research, especially in real world/school settings to provide guidance on how teachers can effectively incorporate digital testimony into their lessons. One study suggests that interactive digital testimony can be a powerful tool with students, but still has limitations, particularly those connected to long-term pedagogical goals (Marcus, 2024).

We invite you to submit a unique article that summarizes and extends research and scholarship on Teaching Social Studies with Digital Testimony. Manuscripts submitted for consideration may be research/empirical reports and analyses, conceptual essays, or histories that help teachers to initiate, extend, or improve their practice with using digital testimony to teach social studies.

Please signal your interest in contributing to this issue by submitting an abstract of no more than 500 words to Guest Editor Alan Marcus, University of Connecticut, by November 1, 2024 (authors notified in December 2024, articles due February 2025, issue published spring 2025):
alan.marcus@uconn.edu

Submission Topics The range of potential topics might include, but is not limited to:

• Emergence of testimony using immersive technologies
• History of testimony use
• Ethical issues of using digital testimony
• Empathy and digital testimony
• Digital testimony and social media
• The role of digital testimony in representing past events
• Digital testimony at museums
• Students’ trust and critique of digital testimony
• The role of digital testimony in enhancing/challenging collective memory
• Digital testimony as primary, secondary, and/or tertiary witnessing
• Teaching about history and memory through digital testimony

What counts as testimony in the digital age

•  Teacher practice/pedagogical decision making
• Educational resources/curriculum materials
• Other topics as submitted

 

References:
Assman, Aleida. (2006, Summer). History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony. Poetics Today 27 (2) 261-273. doi 10.1215/03335372-2005-003
Baquero, Rafael Perez. (2021). Witnessing Catastrophe: Testimony and Historical Representation Within and Beyond the Holocaust. Studia Phaenomenologica. 21, 177-196.
Hass, B.J. (2020). Bearing Witness: Teacher Perspectives on Developing Empathy through Holocaust Survivor Testimony. The Social Studies, 111(2), 86-103. DOI: 10.1080/00377996.2019.1693949
Hirsch, M., & Spitzer, L. (2009). The witness in the archive: Holocaust Studies/ Memory Studies. Memory Studies, 2(2), 151–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698008102050
Maiberg, E. (2017). In the Future, the Holocaust Is Just Another Hologram. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ez3m4p/in-the-future-the-holocaust-is-just-another-hologram
Marcus, A.S. (2024). “She's in the room with us…”: approaches to digital Holocaust survivor testimony in an American secondary school. In (Eds.), A. Ballis, F. Duda and M. Gloe. Testimony Meets Technology – Digital Interactive Testimonies of Holocaust Survivors. Springer.
Schwartzman, Roy (2020). (Re)Mediating Holocaust Survivor Testimony. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal. 7 (12), 68-80. DOI:10.14738/assrj.712.9410.

 

About ASSERT
Website: https://assertjournal.com/index.php/assert 

Mission: To provide social studies teachers with open-access reiterations of key research findings that illuminate the practical implications of social studies scholarship in short, accessible summaries.

Vision: Through ASSERT, K-12 social studies teachers will have access to seminal and emerging insights into social studies teaching and learning from published research that can help to foster an acceleration of powerful and purposeful social studies in North America and around the globe. Typically, our research is hidden from teachers’ view behind paywalls, or are so dense as to deter teachers from finishing the articles.

Scope: The aim and content of ASSERT is to provide a broad range of ways to engage with social studies and its related disciplines. Critical and Traditional content, approaches, and methodologies are welcomed. Special consideration will be given to work that may challenge teachers’ thinking, perspectives, or approaches to teaching content, especially content that is often missing from social studies classrooms. ASSERT will not shy away from controversial topics or approaches, but expects respectful, inclusive language and discourse that respects diversity from its contributing authors.

Access: Open access (free to publish, free-to-read) online journal, run by the Open Journal System hosted at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.
Review Type: Single-blind peer-reviewed (reviewers know who the author is because their work being summarized and extended for ASSERT is already published elsewhere; the researchers don’t know who the reviewers are). Each piece published in ASSERT will be reviewed by two professionals: A scholar with expertise in the area, and a practicing social studies teacher. This will help ensure the academic fidelity to the research and accessibility and relevance for the audience, teachers primarily.
Publications: The journal will include reflections of timely and thought-provoking research and scholarship relevant to social studies teachers.

Scholarly Articles:
Works published in ASSERT are reflections of academics’ previously published, peer-reviewed work. These summaries are intended to illuminate the core conclusions and implications for teachers in a concise and accessible manner (1500 words): The sections of the summaries will be broken down as follows:

Description of the research process (400 words)

Description of the findings/implications (500 words)

Description of ideas for incorporating this scholarship into practice in K-12 classrooms (600 words)

Q & A Companion:
Before your article is published, your reviewer, the editors, or another practitioner will submit several questions to you about your article that are of pressing concern to teachers. Their questions and your responses will be published as part of your article. The purpose of this addendum is to provide teachers with more context while helping to make sure that the scholarship published in our journal is responsive to teachers’ thinking on the matter.

Writing: Writing should be professional, but colloquial. This is not a journal for scholarly readers, so authors should avoid jargon or stuffy, pretentious language. Authors are free to make use of word play, humor, slang or nonstandard English (nonstandard uses may require additional explanatory notes).

Citation: Please use the most recent edition of APA (7).

Questions: Questions about the process of publication can be directed to the lead editor, Cory Wright-Maley: assertjournal@gmail.com