A generation of young people in Canada has grown up in the face of the so-called "War on Terror". Where previous generations have confronted the Cold War or the World Wars, this is the war that has shaped today's young people's narratives of collective memory. My study investigates the following research questions: How young people in Canada understand "the War on Terror"? How they see "the War on Terror" affecting their lives and their constructions of imagined communities (Anderson, 1983)? How they make collective memories of "the War on Terror" based on these understandings? I collect my data in the form of written narratives, follow-up interviews, and demographic questionnaires. Building on theoretical models from the field of collective memory studies (Halbwachs, 1980; Wertsch, 2002), nationalism studies (Anderson, 1983; Billig, 1995), and cultural representations (Said, 1980; Hall, 1980, 1997, 2000, 2002), I explore the understandings, representations and experiences of young people in the form of the collective memories of "the War on Terror". I find that the terrain of collective memory is like the topography. This topography has three main features: human agents, technologies of memory (Wertsch, 2002) and different social groups or communities. My participants construct collective memories through processes that involve a collectivity of significant 'others', including parents and teachers, or what I call 'interpretative communities'. Significantly, the hegemonic narrative, according to the participants of my study, is not the official Canadian government's narrative of "the War on Terror", rather my participants reject the image of Canada as a military nation in favor of that of a multicultural peaceful nation. I also find that "the War on Terror" has personally affected the young Canadian Muslim participants of this study in ways that it has not the non-Muslim participants.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/30084 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Shahzad, Farhat |
| Publisher | University of Ottawa (Canada) |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 318 p. |
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