Services.
Difficult history is disruptive. It challenges us to rethink who we are and the world we live in. We help you to tell these difficult stories, and we help your visitors, stakeholders, or students, to make meaning from them.
Exhibitions.
The artefacts in your collection are witness to past lives, ideas, and events. We allow them to speak.
Through the careful selection, imaginative presentation and compelling interpretation of objects, photographs, oral histories, artworks and documents we curate richly textured narratives revealing new insights into the past and the people who lived through it.
Your visitors will be intellectually challenged, emotionally engaged, and moved to reflect on the continued meaning and significance of the past for today’s complex world.
Related projects: Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. / Seeing Auschwitz
Education consultancy.
Exploring difficult pasts can be disorientating and confusing.
Young people are challenged to re-examine what they thought they knew about the world and human behaviour. We ensure that this is a safe encounter - that students are moved, but not traumatised. We work with you to develop effective pedagogical approaches; create powerful educational materials; and provide professional development for teachers and museum educators.
Related projects: USHMM / UCL Centre for Holocaust Education
Study tours of authentic sites.
We design and lead study tours for a wide variety of groups, based on an interactive methodology developed at Mauthausen Memorial in Austria.
This centres on three interconnected elements: the topography of the site (what can be seen and discovered in that place); the history of what happened there, revealed through photographs, documents and intensely moving personal stories; and - uniquely - the biographies of the participants themselves. Each individual is therefore at the heart of the visit.
Each brings their own values, attitudes, questions and opinions. Together they unearth the meanings of a shared experience, and a difficult past.
Related projects and blogs: Holocaust Study Tours / Pizza in Auschwitz / The never born
Participant-centred learning.
We host meaningful conversations on difficult histories, helping visitors, educators and school students to explore issues of civic responsibility in the past and the present.
Difficult histories raise hard questions about who we are, how we choose to live together, and the kind of society we wish to bring about. Together with Austrian associate, Wolfgang Schmutz, we create spaces where these ideas are exchanged and discussed, where people take responsibility for their own meaning-making, and feel empowered as a result.
Related project: USHMM
Lectures and workshops.
Paul Salmons is a sought-after keynote speaker, presenter, and teacher who has taught throughout Europe and the United States, as well as Israel, Argentina, Australia, South Africa and China.
He was the first overseas educator to address Yad Vashem’s national conference for Israeli teachers; gave the inaugural keynote address at the first international conference of the Centre for Humanistic Values, Israel; the inaugural David Cesarani Memorial Lecture, Royal Holloway; the keynote address at Yad Vashem’s 10th International Conference on Holocaust Education; and has spoken at the United Nations and UNESCO.
Related blog: Recent and upcoming talks, lectures and workshops
Policy.
We help policy makers to understand the issues at stake when societies re-examine the stories they tell about themselves.
Whether advising on the creation of new national monuments, building historical museums, or mandating school curricula, we draw on the latest empirical research to inform policy makers as they unearth difficult questions about the events that have formed us, about who we are, and who we want to be.
We help them to consider how public policy around historical memory informs and shapes our national and communal identities; how the past is always present in how we view ourselves, each other, and the world today.
Related project: Policy development
How can we help?
Drop us a note to discuss your project.