Twelve years after the last federally operated Indian Residential School closed in 1996, the government of Canada apologized to the system’s survivors. They’d been put through so much they hadn’t deserved, from forced removals from their families and communities to deprivations of food, their ancestral languages, adequate sanitation; from forced labor and adherence to the Christian faith to physical abuse.

Although many students died at these schools, which were funded by the Canadian Government’s Department of Indian Affairs and administered by Christian churches, or succumbed to post-traumatic stress, alcoholism and substance abuse, others made it out and were able to share their stories.

Many of their testimonies have now been incorporated into a project by researchers at the University of Manitoba called Embodying Empathy, which seeks to construct a digital representation of a Canadian Indian Residential School using virtual and augmented reality technologies.

“The project’s digital ‘storyworld’ is being designed through the active participation of Residential School Survivors as a museum-quality educational tool that will instruct those immersed in it about Canadian settler-colonial genocide, of which the Indian Residential School system constitutes one significant node,” said Adam Muller, director of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at the University of Manitoba, and his fellow researchers in their paper proposal.

A paper on the challenges of the project will be presented at USC Shoah Foundation’s 2017 International Conference “Digital Approaches to Genocide Studies,” co-sponsored by the USC Mellon Digital Humanities Program. The two-day conference Oct. 23 and 24, which will be held at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, invited scholars from across the globe to converge and discuss the relationship between digital methodologies, practices, ethics and the nature of contemporary Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

“This conference offers a valuable opportunity to connect with others similarly working at the intersection of new digital technologies and the representations of genocide,” Muller said. “We will be discussing the origins of our project in both the work of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and debates preceding the creation of the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, which opened in Winnipeg in 2015.”

Muller’s team will present a demo of their working prototype, an overview of their consultation and design process, and discuss their strategies for overcoming the funding constraints on survivor-led projects. During their presentation, they’ll attempt to answer whether immersive representations can bridge the empathetic distance separating victims from secondary witnesses to historical trauma.

With their representation of the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School on the Sagkeeng First Nation, the team “hopes to show how some of the innovation at the heart of Embodying Empathy can change our understanding both of the ways in which testimony can be used to educate and transform those digitally immersed in it…We will also explain how we propose to evaluate the success of our virtual ‘storyworld,’ in particular its ability to create an understanding of others’ suffering that is conducive to ‘sticky’ kinds of moral and epistemological uptake.”

Muller looks forward to hearing more about the range of genocide-related projects making use of new technologies to represent traumatic experience at the conference, which will feature over a dozen scholars presenting on a variety of subjects, from the netnography of digital autobiographical documentary to the capacities of geographic information systems for analyzing Holocaust spaces.

“I plan on undertaking more work in this area, and particularly working with my Embodying Empathy co-directors to establish an international partnership of similar projects all working to redraw the boundaries of what we think genocide representations and the representation of traumatic testimony can look like and be made to do,” Muller said.

Muller’s past research makes him well-equipped to do so. The scholar focuses on the ways that mass violence and atrocity are represented across a variety of media, especially digital media and photography, and his work arises from his interdisciplinary training as a critical and cultural theorist. The editor of several works on art, politics and society, Muller is also the First-Vice President of the International Association of Genocide Scholar, an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Film and Theatre at the University of Manitoba, a Research Associate with the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Human Rights Research and the Mauro Centre for Peace and Justice Studies.

In addition to the Embodying Empathy project, Muller has been involved with an Australian team in the development of a study on the curation of testimony in survivor-led community Holocaust museums.

“This project is comparative and looks at the way Holocaust testimony is represented at the community level in Canada and Australia, and used both to educate about the Nazi genocide and to deepen our understanding of other genocide, most particularly those involving the attempt to destroy the group life of indigenous peoples in both countries,” Muller said.

Muller has attended two conferences alongside Wolf Gruner, Director of the Institute’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research and worked with him at an Australian survivor-led Holocaust Museum.

He acknowledges the value of the Institute and the events it puts on for the purpose of collaboration amongst scholars and researchers.

“The value of both USC Shoah Foundation and its Visual History Archive are enormous,” Muller said. “Particularly with enhancements to the system used to index testimonies, through forward-looking initiatives like this conference and through hosting visiting student and faculty scholars, USC Shoah Foundation will contribute vitally to directing the research on and curation of testimony over the coming years.”