Olesia Stasiuk & John Young | Genocide Education: Two Museums in Dialogue

DATE: FRIDAY, 27 APRIL 2018 TIME: 3:00 PM VENUE: 1-10 ALBERTA SCHOOL OF BUSINESS, UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA [Business Building, 11211 Saskatchewan Drive]

11 April 2018

John Young, President and CEO of The Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, and Olesia Stasiuk, General Director of the National Museum "Holodomor Victims' Memorial" (NMHVM) in Kyiv, Ukraine, will speak on their respective museum's programs and efforts to educate people about genocide. In their presentations, the two speakers will address questions related to genocide education from the perspective of the institutions they represent. They will speak about their museum exhibits and on raising awareness about genocide. Both will share stories about visitor and student responses to the representations of genocides in their respective museums.

The program will also include the showing of an eleven-minute documentary titled "Covering the Holodomor: Memory Eternal," which was the result of a collaboration between the CMHR and NMHVM. The presentation at the University of Alberta is part of a larger program of presentations across several Canadian cities in recognition of April as Genocide Remembrance, Condemnation and Prevention Month. The CMHR has been working in partnership with the NMHVM on this new initiative.

Olesia Stasiuk has been the General Director of the NMHVM since March 2015. In 2013-15, she was Executive Secretary of the Public Committee for the Commemoration of the Victims of the Holodomor-Genocide of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. In 2006-13, she worked at the International Charitable Foundation "Ukraine 3000," heading the program "Lessons of History: The Holodomor of 1932-1933." Under the auspices of this initiative about 2,000 testimonies were collected, forming the basis of the archival collection at the NMHVM. Olesia Stasiuk obtained her candidate of sciences degree in history at Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv. She is the author of the Ukrainian-language monograph "Genocide of Ukrainians: The Deformation of Folk Culture" (Kyiv, 2006), and numerous scholarly articles.

John Young
has been President and CEO of the CMHR since August 2015. Prior to this, he was Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Northern British
Columbia (UNBC), where he variously held the posts of Interim Provost, Vice President Academic, as well as Dean of the College of Arts, Social and Health Sciences. Dr. Young has also been a visiting professor in the United States and Japan and has lived and worked in Germany and Russia. He has worked with the Canadian Parliamentary Centre as a director of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and served on the CMHR Board of Trustees in 2012-15. John Young obtained a PhD in political science from the University of Toronto.

Co-Sponsored by: Holodomor Research and Education Consortium, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, and
Canadian Museum of Human Rights.