Projects

Prof. Green said it can be difficult to understand how fear can paralyze oppressed people whose narratives have been silenced by the victors. But, she said, it’s possible to resist erasure and tell stories that touch people who are willing to listen and learn. “You have to be daring. You have to be willing to tell your kid or your grandkid a story that could potentially put them in harm,” she said in an interview. “There is a range of ways that people can pass on these stories, and it can be used from acts that don’t even seem political to the acts that are very consciously political.”

Students in Prof. Green's class held an arpillera workshop. Arpilleras, Spanish for burlap, are tapestries of colorful fabric scraps and stitching that tell stories. Working-class women in Chile used tapestries to tell their own stories of trauma they experienced while living under a dictatorship. Green's instructions to her students were simple: “My suggestion was for them to tell a story that they would want to tell.”

“Silences are just as, if not more, insightful into who has control and who does not at a given time”—Evan Clark

“Because memory, whether personal or collective, is subject to manipulation, history and memory have a limited ability to access the past”—Grace Kim

“However, this class has introduced to me the realization that in retrospect, that one culture’s hero could be another culture’s enemy”—Brody Grant

“All throughout American history, the population in power … has pushed a version of history that is incorrect”—Julian Beaujeu-Dufour

“When history becomes a settled narrative, the memorialization or public memory on the topic becomes hard to break”—Jake Winston

“If we don’t continue to remember the past, we are unable to learn from it. And if we don’t learn from history, we are prone to repeating it. That could result in more genocides, losing millions and millions more innocent lives”—Jack Johnson

When a society can recollect its country’s past mistakes, it can push towards a better future while eliminating barriers to success that exist between the targeted victims of oppression

Will Knight

Many governments have acknowledged their wrongdoing yet haven’t created any institutions or infrastructure to eliminate the continued oppression that is perpetuated in present times

Sam Wise

We must continue to create our own historical memory to … shed light on past abuses but also liberate and vindicate those who have been oppressed and hidden

Blake Ramsey

As long as there remains someone who understands the living experiences, memory can be revived and re-entered into the arena of struggle for historicity

Caleb Franklin

“Groups with common identities can pass down their own narratives for generations”—Hannah Shiffert

The top-down power of the nation and the world are challenged by the voices of personal memory

Elena Lee

History is not only a string of events, but a three-dimensional universe, where butterfly effects take place around every corner

Helen Liu

“If historical events were always free, clean, and straightforward, why would history be interesting to study? I think the beauty of studying the past can often be found in the chaos”
—Patrick France