Confronting Conflict through Virtual Worlds

Summary

Three dimensional virtual worlds present new possibilities and new challenges for teaching about difficult pasts or "dark heritages." This paper considers how virtual environments can be used to explore conflict through user interaction with primary and secondary data sets. It will present a virtual world prototype of Idaho’s Kooskia Internment Camp, a World War II Japanese American internment camp that imprisoned over two hundred Japanese American men. Drawing upon pedagogical strategies developed by scholars of digital media and education, this prototype requires that users interact with data sets used by historical archaeologists to reconstruct and interpret the past; users view documents, artifacts, oral histories, and photographs to form their own understandings of violence in the past. Through this exposure to data sets that tell conflicting narratives about Japanese American internment during WWII, users are also encouraged to think about the difficulties involved in writing histories of conflict.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeologies Of Violence And Privilege   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 649