BELMONT, Mass. — The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) will present a webinar on “Genocide Education in Massachusetts: A New Mandate, a New Era, and New Challenges,” on Thursday, February 3, at 7:30 pm (Eastern) / 4:30 pm (Pacific). The program is sponsored by the NAASR/Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Lecture Series on Contemporary Armenian Issues.
The webinar will be accessible live on Zoom (registration required) and on NAASR’s YouTube Channel.
On December 2, 2021, Massachusetts joined the ranks of states mandating genocide education, including on the Armenian Genocide, in public middle and high schools. The law, supported by a diverse coalition of advocates, has been a long time in the making and faced significant challenges and pushback from Turkish organizations to water down the Armenian Genocide component of the law; indeed, for more than two decades, efforts to include the Armenian Genocide have been shadowed by counter-efforts to give equal time to denialist counterfactual narratives.
Join us for a discussion of how the law came into being, the challenges overcome to gain its passage, and its potential impact on students and society as a whole with panelists Eric Cohen (Chairman, Massachusetts Coalition to Save Darfur), Dr. Lerna Ekmekcioglu (Professor of History, MIT), Dr. Dikran Kaligian (Armenian National Committee of America, Eastern Massachusetts), and Herman Purutyan (Massachusetts state chair, Armenian Assembly of America), moderated by Marc A. Mamigonian (Director of Academic Affairs, NAASR).
For more information contact NAASR at hq@naasr.org.
