ABOUT
Learning Cluster 2023
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In our Learning Cluster, 11 students and one professor traveled to South Korea for a week, aiming to understand and examine the idea and practices of dark tourism in South Korea, emphasizing how 'abandoned people' are represented and depicted at various popular touristic sites and museums. Throughout our travel, we immersed ourselves to engage in the issue of internal conflicts over the past and memory, internalizing the voices of “the people on the periphery” who have suffered at the hands of a modern nation-state.
GOALS AND OBJECTIVES
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To help students understand the various ideas and practices of dark tourism
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Develop in student’s ability to understand the complexities and contradictions between the modern achievements and resistance against it
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To help students understand and analyze the origins of internal and/or regional conflicts in dark tourism
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To help students understand the interrelations between the past, the present, and the future
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To help students understand the importance of including as many and diverse memories/experiences as possible in constructing our past
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To enhance the ability of students to work collaboratively toward the investigation of the possibility to construct a conflict-free future
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To prepare students for their role in peace-making efforts by understanding how the different memories of the past have been represented in different societies and touristic sites in East Asia
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and to have more “communicative” historical understanding of what has happened in the past, rather than to judge the past morally and politically, by constructing our “own memories” of the past that could lead a student to make a contributive life as global citizens for a better, peaceful world