"EZRA - Remembering Racism and Anti-Semitism" is a joint project of the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt and the Free University of Berlin, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

"Subproject 1: An empirical study of local remembrance work by civil society initiatives in the activity fields of National Socialism, Colonialism, and post-National Socialist violence", led by Prof. Karin Scherschel (KU), is being implemented in association with "Subproject 2: Digital educational formats for remembrance work on National Socialism, Colonialism, and post-National Socialist violence", led by Prof. Sabine Achour (FU).

Research interest and research questions:

The project aims to explore the significance of civil society initiatives for the public culture of remembrance. It analyzes empirically contrasting local civil society memory work in three fields of activity: National Socialism, Colonialism, and post-National Socialist violence.

By coming to terms with past racist/anti-Semitic violence, such initiatives contribute to critically questioning and expanding current productions of knowledge about racism and anti-Semitism and their social consequences. Their local engagement expands - complementary to school curricula and state-institutional remembrance policies - the diversity of remembrance work. The initiatives provide impulses that help shape the public culture of remembrance even beyond local spheres of influence. Despite this considerable potential, they have hardly been researched in a systematizing comparison.

The central project thesis is that civil society initiatives do not merely apply national discourses and policies locally but pursue an independent agency that brings up neglected issues and perspectives and helps shape the discourse bottom-up.

With this research project, the project has three goals and aims to answer the following questions:

1. It maps the initiatives' understanding of themselves and their problems: How do they define racism and anti-Semitism? What collective constructions of identity do they mobilize? What concept do they have of history, society, and public discourse? What (educational) goals do they set?
2. It analyzes how the initiatives deal with the three areas of tension between a) official national memory discourses and local specificity, b) plurality and the emphasis on singularity, and c) memories of the heterogeneous violent relations of the Shoah and colonialism.
3. It systematizes the learning potentials for political education (work) resulting from the empirical findings and transfers them into formats for an online platform to be developed.

Project Design and Method:

The research project uses qualitative methods of empirical social research: by means of a document analysis as well as group discussions, the above-mentioned project goals are to be implemented.

Firstly, the document analysis aims to create a mapping of the initiatives according to work focus, self-understanding and problem understanding, to gather first insights into their handling of tensions and to prepare the group discussions. The work of about 20 initiatives is intended for a deeper analysis of the existing materials. For these initiatives, the documents will be analyzed in a qualitative content analysis.

Second, group discussions will be conducted to explore how the initiatives work, how they understand themselves, their activities, and their subject matter, and how they relate to the existing areas of tension. The study uses the group discussion method (Bohnsack 1999), which focuses on eliciting the relevance systems of the politically active participants. The documentary method will be used for the evaluation. A total of 20 group discussions with real groups will be conducted.

Transfer:

In a final phase of the project, the online platform EZRA ("Remembrance, Civil Society, Racism, Anti-Semitism") will be developed in a bottom-up oriented theory-empirical-practice transfer. The findings obtained in the project will be processed in the form of educational materials and made publicly available with this online platform. The research project cooperates with practice partners who are engaged in the promotion of democratic processes and thus creates an active network between research and the democratic public. The online platform EZRA is intended to provide an effective transfer and communication format that processes research results in an addressee-oriented manner for politics, science, and society.

Duration:

01/2023 - 12/2026