I have been working in the public history of Second World War internments for nearly 15 years, in collaboration with museum curators, public school teachers, archivists, and other professionals outside the academy. I’m currently contemplating what we aim to do, and what we can be said to achieve, when we do public histories of injustice. I also have a particular interest in the interface of scholarship – and particularly the kinds of complexity that are the foundation of academic history – with the lessons that public histories of injustice often hope to impart. Finally, I’d be interested in discussing how people doing this work measure success, and perhaps failure too.
Past Wrongs, Future Choices (PWFC) is a 7-year (2022-2029) multi-sector and community-engaged project to integrate and tell the history of the internment, incarceration, and dispossession of people of Japanese descent in Australia, Brazil, Canada, and the United States in the 1940s. Working with partners from each of these countries, PWFC is creating exhibitions on Nikkei history, developing teaching resources, producing a documentary film, and establishing digital research infrastructure to facilitate cross national and integrated research.
This partnership initiative builds upon the prior work of Landscapes of Injustice, a partnership focused on the dispossession of Japanese Canadians, which also generated public research infrastructure and websites, teacher resources, and a museum exhibition that is currently travelling across both Canada and Japan. Landscapes of Injustice was the recipient of many honours including an Impact Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, one of Canada’s most important scholarly awards.
Websites: