Description
The field of Transitional Justice has been critiqued for being top-down and state-centric. In response, increased attention has been given to the roles that grassroots and non-state actors can, and do, play. This has included consideration of the role of creative and performing arts, memorialisation, archives, oral history and unofficial forms of truth-telling.Testimony lies at the heart of, and connects, these emerging responses to harm. This roundtable critically explores the role of ‘quiet’ and alternative modes of testimony in transitional justice – the testimonies that emerge outside of mainstream transitional justice mechanisms. This will include, for instance, examination of memoirs as sites of ‘quiet transitional justice’, and the role of art, archives, and oral history in transitioning from conflict.
Our discussion will interrogate a range of themes including the value of experiential knowledge and bearing witness, the diversity of modes of storytelling including aesthetic and acoustic mediums, the democratisation of voice, and the relationship between power and truth. We will draw on a range of theoretical and methodological approaches including critical criminology, narrative victimology, and feminist approaches to critically examine local and international case studies that problematise how we approach victims’ rights, the harms of conflict, and responsibilities to repair.
This roundtable will bring together a group of scholars whose work is broadly thematically related yet distinct in terms of empirical (oral history, archives, theatre, visual arts, and memoir) and geographical (Northern Ireland, Turkey, Rwanda and Chile) focus. It aims to critically reflect and expand on how and why these points of connection echo increasingly strident critiques of the field of transitional justice and offer alternative approaches to ‘doing’ transitional justice which can better centre the needs and wants of victims when addressing conflict-related harm.
Participants: Kevin Hearty, Lauren Dempster, Nisan Alici, Emily Moore & Julia Viebach
| Period | 19 Jun 2024 |
|---|---|
| Event title | North South Irish Criminology Conference: Criminology in times of conflict |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | BelfastShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | National |