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Witness testimonies provide a singular challenge to historians of Auschwitz. Survivor accounts offer a privileged perspective on the world of the camp, yet as recent conceptual work has shown the performative structure of these texts exceeds and eludes this representational duty. The challenge for historians is that, given their privileged, ‘insider’ status, any equivocality regarding the content of witness testimonies provides space for Holocaust denial. This paper offers a critical reading of one historical strategy for meeting this challenge: Exposing witness accounts to an uncompromising criteria of evidentiality and plausibility, designed to test their representational quality as a means of preempting negationist attempts to manipulate ‘faulty’ accounts. Drawing on Lyotard, I argue that, even as this strategy succeeds in refuting individual cases of denial, by refusing to enter into dialogue with the language game of testimony, and, more importantly, by invalidating any attempt to do so, this strategy actually reiterates the tactics of those deniers it is designed to oppose, thus undermining its own important work. Rather than rejecting this historical approach, I argue that it is compromised only by an historiographical insistence on imposing this ‘evidential’ language game as universal and representational; if we conversely recognise its performative, nonrepresentational status, it is more equipped to refute denial and without making of testimony a collateral damage.

Following on from spectral geographical studies of the disruptive aspects of memory, this paper further develops recent interest in the nonrepresentational and paradoxical dynamics of witnessing by drawing out the possibility of a historiography based on the capacity of testimony to interrupt and suspend representational closure. This possibility is posited in relation to the specific historiographical challenges posed by places and events of atrocity, whereby the extreme nature that makes these events so real threatens at the same time to render them the product of a self‐enclosed, alien and absolutely distant world. Through a close reading of Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, I argue that the genre of testimony is predisposed towards generating disruptive encounters that force the reader of such works to take co‐responsibility in making sense of the text. Focusing upon Levi’s famous distinction between ‘the drowned and the saved’ of the camp, and the multiple possible interpretations of this distinction, I further argue that by establishing a space of uncertainty in which audiences must make an interpretive decision about the text without authorial guarantee, the disruptive form of memory that characterises witness testimony has the capacity to cultivate a fleeting recognition of a shared world between witness and reader, past and present.

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COVID-19 has radically changed the higher education sector in Australia and beyond. Restrictions on student movement (especially for international students) and on gatherings (which limited on-campus sessions) saw universities transition to fully online teaching modes almost overnight. In this commentary, we reflect on this transition and consider the implications for teaching the disciplines of geography and planning. Reflecting on experiences at the Department of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University, we explore a series of challenges, responses and opportunities for teaching core disciplinary skills and knowledge across three COVID-19 moments: transition, advocacy, and hybridity. Our focus is on the teaching of core disciplinary skills and knowledge and specifically on geographical theory, methods, and fieldwork and professional practice skills. In drawing on this case from Macquarie University, we offer insights for the future of teaching geography and planning in universities more broadly.