Culture is an integral part of social studies education, and is a generative line of inquiry when placed in conversation with existential concerns. This post qualitative study engages with terror management theory (and its inspiration, the writing of Ernest Becker) to think about culture in the context of extreme historical violence. In particular, the authors re/read accounts from the Nazi massacre of Jews in Jedwabne, Poland (1941) and the Hutu atrocities against Tutsis in Rwanda (1994) while pondering how perpetrators bonded over culture, ordinarilized evil, fetishized evil, and attempted to triumph over death. The authors invite readers to grapple with identifying (re)new(ed) ways of promoting a world that can hurt less by engaging with accounts of extreme violence to think through the cultivation of non-violent ways of be(com)ing.
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