Master Degree Program
Transcultural and Memory Studies
(TMS)

 

     Recently, the English Language and Culture Department at FLASH summoned its expertise to design a Master’s program entitled: ‘Transcultural and Memory Studies.’ TMS is designed, as an innovative multidisciplinary program to be hosted at the Faculty of Languages, Arts, and Humanities. It introduces students to a variety of disciplines such as Cultural Studies, Memory Studies, Heritage, Migration and Identity studies, Border crossing memories, etc. Students are expected to tease out some of the most influential theories and approaches related to such concepts as culture, memory, history, trauma, etc.

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   The program aims at raising students’ awareness of the inextricable interplay between culture and memory, and how the concept of memory (individual, collective, episodic, trans-generational) can be a compatible vehicle towards processes of re-visiting, re-thinking, and reconstructing, both local and global, culture and heritage. The program pursues sensitising students about a variety of social and cultural markers such as language, race, class, ethnicity, gender, and how these concepts can be tackled from the perspective of memory studies.

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Critical Theories on Heritage (S1)

 

         Heritage studies attracted increased attention as the field of collective memory practices to stimulate novel forms of cultural interpretation and production both tangible and intangible. This course endeavours to approach cultural legacy as the contested field of power and discourse. The aim is to investigate how power, identity and knowledge intersect with the practice, interpretation, display and management of cultural heritage. This module is designed to make students reflect on how the histories, theories, changing methods, ideologies, intellectual traditions, and world events have influenced heritage conservation since the mid-19th century; read scholarly texts on heritage critically, with an eye to understanding theoretical frameworks, methods employed, and key arguments in western academia; approach the different competitive intersections of power, knowledge, discourse, and interest groups to understand how heritage conservation functioned in the past and present; test a variety of biased theoretical and methodological approaches of world heritage from the perspective of Western or Orientalist gaze; get insights through the understanding of both tangible and intangible cultural heritage; look at the very pressing problem of contemporary heritage reconstruction and commemoration in the wake of world conflicts; consider if there are ways to work towards a conservation of reconciliation in a growingly glocal world; and participate in discussions, drawing upon thoughtful analysis of the assigned literature.

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