The Problem with “Being There”

Abstract

Student visits to sites of trauma and violence are fundamentally based on the promise that there is an educational value of “being there”; a direct encounter with history through seeing, hearing, and feeling. Over the course of three years of leading a Holocaust study abroad program, my observations would certainly align with the expectation of such promise. However, and as existing research shows, it is not often clear what the exact value, impact, or takeaway in fact is—or ought to be. Through an exploration of the opportunities and limits of visiting sites of trauma with groups of students, and here through the lens of the encounters with my own cohorts, I suggest that the first step to a deep engagement with historic sites and museums must be to prompt students to decode the ethical complexities of self-reflexivity, visual literacy, and the politics of spectatorship.