The day started with a thought provoking lecture on European Memory by Dr. Uilleam Blacker, currently a lecturer at UCL SSEES department. The difficulty of defining the term “European Memory” and deciding what it consists of made an interesting discussion topic. Being his area of specialty, the lecturer talked about Eastern Europe, how it views some of the big events in Europe’s history such as the Holocaust, and how the way it remembers these might differ from the Western European point of view. He also made us think about all the ways collective memory is formed and passed on from one generation to the other. We saw specific cases of historic events being portrayed in films, literature, monuments etc.
After the lecture we had a short meeting with the group to decide on everyone’s tasks for the day.
In the afternoon we had the language course with Petroc. He talked about possessive pronouns in Welsh, and the different kinds of mutations that come with different pronouns.. We learned that, interestingly, there are several words in Welsh that correspond to the verb “to have” in English. Then we moved on to music and religion in Wales. We looked at the lyrics of a song by Gwyneth Glyn and listened to a few more songs from artists that are well-known in Wales, but was unheard of by most of us. We learned that a typical village in Wales consists of one Church and four Chapels. Chapels are where families go on Sundays, they also have social clubs, like Rugby clubs, and choirs. Whereas Churches would be where people have their weddings.
We spent the rest of the afternoon focusing on the documentary. We wrote down the story we’ll try to convey with the documentary and started cutting and rearranging our footage.
European London 