Resisting Indifference Through the Brooch of Bergen Belsen

Abstract

In this extract from, and commentary on, my master’s thesis, “The Brooch of Bergen Belsen: A Journey of Historiographic Poiesis” (winning York University Department of Education Best Major Research Paper 2010), I explore a single aesthetic experience, an encounter with a small hand-made floral cloth brooch donated to the Holocaust Memorial Museum. At the start of my inquiry, I had only the object—the brooch itself—my emotional reaction to it, and the few lines of text on a curated museum card. I wondered, how do we create “spaces for remembrance” (Simon 2005) and what are the implications for teaching, learning and living in a just society? How arewe accountable to Simon’s (2004) demand for “non-indifference?” Arts-based research methodologies such as historiographic poiesis have allowed me to merge the scholar and artist, to engage in research as an iterative process where deeper questions engender more complex and embodied responses, and to create an aesthetic intervention: an open, dialogic text and artworks that provoke new understandings of narratives previously overlooked.