Presently, history, heritage, and memory are omnipresent in the public sphere. They are the object of public politics, private initiatives, individual endeavors, artistic or not. They are also the object of projects economic and industrial in scope (tourism, serious games, digital treatment of heritage). Finally, the media give them a place of honor. Yet, while numerous actors have used the past as an object of their work and/or of their daily politics, there are few places that provide the necessary linkage between history, heritage, and memory. Because these three notions are often separate, even in the institutional structure: to the heritage, economic and cultural development of localities; to the memory, the development of the citizen conscience; to history, the transmission of knowledge about the past.
The first objective of this highly professionalizing university diploma open to continuing and traditional education is to empower the interns about the problematics of the mediation of the past. How do these notions situate themselves in relation to each other? How are they mobilized in the conduct of cultural policies and citizenship? What are the challenges and arrangements of the mediation of the past, and what are the modalities of analysis of their effects on the public? Is there certitude as to the role of mediation of the past for the construction of the ordinary?
The diploma’s second objective is to endow the interns with new competencies in terms of mediation strategies (history, heritage, memory): analysis and comprehension of these mediation strategies in situ, of the questions that they pose, of the competencies that they require from their potential impact; analysis and comprehension of the digital strategies, choices, that they offered to the operators, of their consequences; analysis of online and in situ uses and comprehension of the appropriations of the past that ensue.
Through a professional memory centered on the presentation and the analysis of a strategy of the past, this diploma aims, lastly, to encourage the conception and the project management having history, memory, heritage.
More information is available on the University of Paris Nanterre’s web page dedicated to graduate training.
Photo : © BnF/CNRS-Maison Archéologie & Ethnologie, photo Serge Oboukhoff