On February 22, Dr Lorraine Ryan spoke as an invited speaker at the forum, “ The politics of memory practices: Making the past present in contemporary education” at the internationally renowned Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunweig, Germany.
The Institute has acted as an advisor to the Australian, Israeli, and German governments as well as to international textbook publishers. Later, in a packed session with members of the German public, she discussed the Spanish assimilation of the Holocaust in a session entitled ‘Local practices of appropriating globally circulating narratives of victimhood’. Her specially commissioned paper, entitled ‘The Limitations of Counter-Memory’, delivered on Tuesday 23rd, focused on the neutralization of commodified counter-memory, and argued that memory consumers cannot automatically assume that counter-memory generates moral traction.