In our final conference "warm-up" talk before the summer, Tomasz Łysak (University of Warsaw) discussed "vlogging Auschwitz."

Content creators on YouTube have turned to documenting their visits to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in vlog form. This increasingly popular social media format has made it possible for influencers to take up the role of popular historian, endowing their trips with a sense of moral responsibility. This talk argues that it is necessary to apply critical tools not only to content analysis but also to metadata and various methods of curating visibility on the platform. In addition to this, it delves into mechanisms of self-promotion and the fate of official narratives of commemoration in an era of user-generated content. Is this new cohort of popular history practitioners a welcome development in the field of commemoration?

Tomasz Łysak, University of Warsaw, received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Polish Academy of Sciences. His work focuses on representations of the Holocaust in relation to trauma studies and psychoanalysis. He has held fellowships at the University of Washington, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Chicago. Łysak has published on documentaries, art and fiction films, graphic novels, photography, and trauma studies in a number of essay collections and journals.

This talk is brought to you as a collaboration between the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz, the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Graz, and the Austro-American Society for Styria.

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