Join us for a thought-provoking discussion that delves into the ethics of representation and the complexities involved in taking and engaging with testimony of atrocity.

This event will explore the responsibilities of researchers working within a framework of a feminist ethics of care when documenting and sharing the experiences of those who have endured extreme suffering.

The panel discussion will be followed by a poetry reading by Dr Choman Hardi.

Chair

Professor Rachel Kerr

Rachel Kerr is a contemporary historian whose research focuses broadly on how states, societies and individuals contend with legacies of war and atrocity. Her past work has focused on the law and politics of international judicial intervention in the context of the ICTY’s record in the Western Balkans, the Special Court in Sierra Leone and the International Criminal Court’s examination of the UK’s handling of allegations of war crimes in Iraq (2003-9).

Rachel’s current research is focused on the role of art and creative approaches to contending with ongoing and past violence, and how visual and embodied methodologies can be leveraged to address intersectional gendered violence in the context of war and genocide.

Speakers

Professor Jelke Boesten

Jelke Boesten is Professor in Gender and Development, PI on the Visual Embodied Methodologies Network project Intersectional Gendered Violence and Associate Dean, Doctoral Studies for the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy at King's. She has written extensively on sexual violence in war and in peace, social policy and politics, and gender-based violence in Peru.

Her latest books are: (with Helen Scanlon), Gender and Memorial Arts (2021); (with WRV Collective), Women Resisting Violence (2022) and (with Lurgio Gavilán), Perros y promos, memoria, violencia, y afecto en el Perú posconflicto (2023).

She published two papers on the ethics of researching (sexual) atrocity: (with Marsha Henry), ‘Talking Silences: Research Fatigue and the Responsibility of the Researcher’, Social Politics, Vol 25 (4) (2018), pp. 568–588; and more recently with Lurgio Gavilán, ‘Debris. Autoethnography, feminist epistemology, ethics, and sexual violence’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol 26 (3) (2024), pp. 523-543.

Dr Choman Hardi

Choman Hardi is an educator, poet, and scholar whose work is informed by an intersectional approach to inequality. She is renowned for her pioneering work on issues of gender and education. Choman returned home after twenty-six years of displacement, to teach English and initiate gender studies at the American University of Iraq- Sulaimani (AUIS). Choman is a Co-Director of the GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub, on which she is researching about the role of institutions and practices on the construction of masculinity.

She is the author of critically acclaimed books in the fields of poetry, academia, and translation. In 2011, her Leverhulme Trust funded post-doctoral research, Gendered Experiences of Genocide (Routledge) was named a UK Core Title by the Yankee Book Peddler.

Since 2010, poems from her first English collection, Life for Us (Bloodaxe, 2004) are studied by secondary school students as part of their English curriculum in the UK. Her second collection, Considering the Women (Bloodaxe, 2015), was given a Recommendation by the Poetry Book Society and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection.

Dr Rebecca Jinks

Rebecca Jinks is an historian of twentieth-century genocide and humanitarianism, with particular specialisms in the Armenian genocide and the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and humanitarian responses to them. She approaches these from a social and cultural historical angle and is interested in the experiences and actions of ordinary people (within the context of state violence or humanitarian operations), in gendered histories, and in how we can use photographs and non-standard sources to gain deeper or different insights into historical processes and events.

Rebecca recently curated an exhibition at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, 'Genocidal Captivity', exploring stories of Armenian and Yezidi women held in genocidal captivity, using humanitarian records of Armenian survivors from the 1920s and recent interviews with and compelling portraits of Yezidi survivors in Iraq.

Dr Henry Redwood

Henry is a Lecturer in War Studies at King's. Henry’s work sits at the intersection of international relations, international law and history. His research explores how communities are formed through, and as a result, of war. Empirically, theoretically and methodologically this has drawn on law, archives and aesthetic politics as important sites and processes of community production and governance. His work focuses on Rwanda, Bosnia and, more recently, Ukraine.