As a Remembrance Scholar, Joshua McMaster said he wanted to make storytelling an instrumental part of Remembrance Week.

Remembrance Week is held each year to honor the victims of the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. All 259 passengers and crew aboard the plane — including 35 students who were traveling home after studying abroad through Syracuse University — and 11 people on the ground were killed in the terrorist attack. Each year 35 SU seniors represent the students who died and organize a week of events to share their stories and educate the campus on the tragedy.

Many Remembrance Scholars, including McMaster, have found a lack of understanding among SU students about what Remembrance Week is. As a result, McMaster said he saw the potential to emphasize storytelling as a way to help the SU campus learn more about the bombing and who the victims were.

One way the Remembrance Scholars are doing this is through a pop-up museum display on the promenade, said McMaster, who is a senior computer art and animation major. The display, which is a new addition to the usual list of Remembrance events, will include four different panels. The first panel is about the students’ time abroad and will feature postcards and photographs from almost every student.

“It’s very powerful,” McMaster said. “That one started to get me after a bit.”

The second panel includes a timeline of events directly preceding and following the terrorist attack. The third panel is dedicated to legislation and memorials that were made in honor of the bombing.

McMaster said Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, Inc. is an organization that has advocated for and was a “huge lobbying force,” of the laws that were passed after the tragedy.

The final panel will list all 270 names of the Pan Am victims.

“This museum exhibit was a very, very concrete way of literally laying out the entire story of Pan Am Flight 103 in front of everyone,” McMaster said. “We are getting this out where people can’t ignore it … and then they’ll start to understand why it’s important.”

The promenade museum display was this year’s “big undertaking” for McMaster and the other nine scholars on the displays team. The scholars also worked to make the museum display more accessible by including audio, QR codes and braille for all of the information. In addition to this museum, the team also helped set up the usual Remembrance displays, such as the chairs on the Quad that represent where each SU student sat on Pan Am Flight 103.

Remembrance Week events started with a candlelight vigil on Sunday night and will continue throughout the week, culminating in the Rose Laying Ceremony on Friday at 2:03 p.m. — the exact time Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie.

Some of the events this week include a “Media and Terrorism panel” on Monday, an all-day acts of kindness event on Tuesday, a “Challenging Narratives of Terrorism panel” on Wednesday and an open mic night on Thursday.

The “Challenging Narratives of Terrorism panel” will focus on thinking about terrorism in new ways, said Zainab Abdali, one of the Remembrance Scholars and a senior English and textual studies and mathematics double major. For example, Abdali said one of the panelists is a refugee student who had experienced war and violence. She said this is not the same as terrorism, but sometimes “we kind of center on certain types of suffering and victimhood, and we kind of forget about others.”

Watching all of the planning and preparation come to fruition is what Remembrance Scholar Kelsey Montondo is most looking forward to, she said.

Said Montondo: “We have been doing this for what feels like so long, and finally the week’s here.”

Published on October 22, 2017 at 11:16 pm

Contact Sara: smswann@syr.edu | @saramswann