{"id":60968,"date":"2013-01-18T13:45:03","date_gmt":"2013-01-18T18:45:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=60968"},"modified":"2017-02-22T17:21:05","modified_gmt":"2017-02-22T22:21:05","slug":"dauge-roth-rwanda-international-educator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2013\/01\/18\/dauge-roth-rwanda-international-educator\/","title":{"rendered":"Dauge-Roth’s course on teaching genocide highlighted in International Educator"},"content":{"rendered":"
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An image from the 2009 Bates visit to Rwanda for the course “Learning with the Orphans of the Rwanda Genocide.”<\/p><\/div>\n

In its story about teaching genocide, International Educator<\/em> features the Bates course “Learning with Orphans of the Rwandan Genocide,” taught by Associate Professor of French Alex Dauge-Roth.<\/p>\n

Writer Dana Wilkie frames the challenge of teaching genocide this way: “How does a university program…address the power of political regimes and demagogues bent on inciting the sort of hatred that leads one people to commit atrocities against another?”<\/p>\n

Dauge-Roth, who conducts ongoing research in Rwanda and directs the nonprofit Friends of Tubeho<\/a><\/strong>, offers an answer by first noting that “we all have defenses that allow us to intellectualize” horrific acts like genocide.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut when there\u2019s more intimate proximity with the human effects of genocide, the way you relate to such events shifts radically,” he says.<\/p>\n

In the case of Dauge-Roth’s course, he and students travel to Rwanda, where students partner with orphans of the 1994 genocide to create oral histories and other documentary resources.<\/p>\n

Achieving this kind of “intimate proximity” (which is the title of the article), creates “ways to move on and to create connections and dialogues\u201d to prevent future genocide.<\/p>\n