Collective Memory As Pedagogy: A Multimodal, Historical Discourse Analysis of Vietnam War Curriculum Materials

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Collective (Re)membering and Imagining Futures

Abstract

This research examines Vietnam War curricular materials provided by the New York Times Learning Network. The materials constitute a pedagogic discourse (Bernstein, 1990) that recontextualizes historical knowledge by obscuring its original social, political, and epistemic contexts. From Multimodal and Historical Discourse Analysis perspectives (van Leeuwen, 2008; Reisigl & Wodak, 2009), findings show the materials reinforce a necropolitical discourse (Mbembe, 2003) of the war and its collective memory. Necropolitics positions the Vietnamese as the living dead, stripping them of agency as social actors and narrators of their lived history, while preserving U.S. imperial sovereignty over life and death. We call for teaching past wars as critical engagements with collective memory—a site of contestation and negotiation (Milani & Richardson, 2022).

Authors

• Minh Nghia-Nguyen, University of Massachusetts - Boston

• Panayota Gounari, University of Massachusetts - Boston