Kori Street to Discuss Genocide Education at Armenian Genocide Centennial Conference

Kori Street, USC Shoah Foundation Director of Education, will join other education experts for a panel discussion at the Responsibility 2015 conference in New York City, which will commemorate the centennial anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

Responsibility 2015 is organized by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF)’s Eastern U.S. Committee. ARF was founded in 1890 and led the effort to establish the first Armenian Republic in 1918. Since then, it has established a presence throughout the Armenian Diaspora to support communities and contribute to the stability and security of Armenia and its people.

The conference will be held March 13 to 15 at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City. Experts and scholars in the Armenian Genocide will participate in panel discussions and lectures about topics including “The Armenian Genocide in US Policy Circles,” “Attitudes in Turkey” and “Gender and Genocide.”

Street will participate in a panel titled “Genocide Education,” with Deborah Dwork, Rose Professor of Holocaust History at Clark University and founding director of the Strassler Center; Sara Cohan, Education Director of The Genocide Education Project; and Mary Papazian, President of Southern Connecticut State University.

Street will present her paper “I am an eyewitness, seeing a nation that died”:  Using Testimonies in Teaching About the Armenian Genocide.

In his interview with Richard Hagopian, Sam Kadorian utters the words in this title.  His interview is one of the many being ingested into the University of Southern California Visual History Archive.  Once ingested, it will be available for use in education around the world. This presentation will engage the theoretical and practical implications of effectively using the audio-visual testimonies of the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive.  Students have demonstrated significant cognitive and affective gains across disciplines when testimony based education is used in teaching.  With a focus on the teaching of genocide, both as a historically specific moment and a universal human experience, the presentation will explore the challenges and opportunities of using first person narrative.

USC Shoah Foundation is currently in the process of digitizing, cataloging and indexing its new Armenian Genocide Collection into the Visual History Archive. The 400 interviews were collected by the late Dr. J. Michael Hagopian from 1972-2005, and include Armenian Genocide survivors, witnesses and scholars. The first batch of 40 testimonies will be integrated into the Visual History Archive in April 2015, and will also be featured in new IWitness activities.

Richard Hovannisian, Professor Emeritus of History at UCLA, will also speak on the “Armenian Genocide Scholarship” panel. He is currently adjunct professor at USC for his support to USC Shoah Foundation on the Armenian Genocide Collection.

To register to attend Responsibility 2015, click here.