Democratic pilgrimage: Swedish students' understanding of study trips to Holocaust memorial sites

This article focuses on Swedish students' understanding of study trips to Holocaust memorial sites. Although about a quarter of all Swedish teenagers visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum each year, with the majority visiting as students as part of their school curriculum, this study is the first to examine these study trips from a student perspective. By applying critical discourse analysis, this article analyses 49 students' reflections, written before, during, and after two study trips. The results suggest that the study trips' discursive practice, which constitutes and is constituted by the study trips' social practice, is regulated by a discursive order termed democratic pilgrimage. In addition, this article reveals two didactic deviations from previous research on study trips: the students' positive feelings in relation to the Polish environment and the balance between victim and perpetrator perspectives. The latter creates tension within the students and is solved via articulations of democratic values.