Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the legal, relational, representational, and ethical dilemmas faced by anthropologists witnessing violence perpetrated by close informants. I advocate for a holistic approach to violence witnessing, which looks at physical, symbolic and structural violence together.

Paper Abstract:

Witnessing situations of violence is part of the work of many applied anthropologists, but what happens when those committing violence are one’s closest informants? Based on long-term ethnographic research with adolescents involved in Colombia’s criminal gangs, in this paper I reflect on the complexities of relating to, building ethnographic empathy with, and engaging in participant observation of individuals who are perpetrators of violence. I argue that this kind of research presents the ethnographer with several dilemmas. To begin with, witnessing violence imposes a legal obligation to report, which clashes with the ethnographic commitment to anonymity and confidentiality. Moreover, much violence is relational, meaning that the presence of the researcher as a witness may influence, or even generate, violent actioning. Additionally, a focus on violence as the object of the ethnographic inquiry implies serious risks of falling into ‘cowboy ethnography’ (Contreras 2013), or of producing a ‘pornography of violence’ (Bourgois 1995), thereby further stigmatizing, rather than emancipating, the study population. Last but not least, pursuing activist anthropologist becomes a challenge when one’s informants' agenda and values heavily clash with the researcher’s moral world. Does suspending moral judgment towards violence also imply suspending action to prevent it? To tackle these challenges, I propose a holistic approach to violence witnessing that looks at physical, symbolic, and structural violence together (as opposed to essentializing violent incidents and addressing them out of context). Within this approach, the ethnographer can still act to tackle structural causes of violence, while also helping to understand individuals’ violent behaviour.

Paper Short Abstract:

Combining Critical Poetic Inquiry with ethnography, this paper explores the analytical and methodological potential of poetic testimony after witnessing extreme forms of violence for anthropologists and their interlocutors.

Paper Abstract:

Integrating Critical Poetic Inquiry into anthropological research treats poetry as a potent socio-political phenomenon and sets it into a wider conversation on individual and societal trauma after instances of violence. This paper discusses the analytical and methodological potential of poetic testimony for both researchers and their interlocutors.

Witnessing instances of extreme forms of state violence in Managua was traumatic and disrupted my fieldwork in 2018. However, it also formed the premise for becoming a credible researcher and conducting further fieldwork on Nicaraguan exiles in Western Europe.

Recounting witness accounts relates to a broader scholarly debate in Latin America, known as 'testimonio'. Especially in Nicaragua, poetry has become an expression of vernacular resistance to its violent regime in the past years. This is not coincidental: Nicaragua, also known as the “nation of poets,” has strategically used poetry for discourses on national and revolutionary identity. After mass protests turned into crimes against humanity (GIEI, 2019), hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans fled, many of them reverting to writing poetry about their traumatic experiences.

Delivering testimony through poetry becomes a personal archive of memories of violence breaking through the governance of fear that exiles are subjected to (Vasanthakumar, 2022). It also opens the potential to conduct research on and with communities that otherwise are inaccessible to researchers. Moreover, through this process, the asymmetry between individual witnesses' accounts and indirect witnessing and between researcher and interlocutor is lifted (albeit temporarily) and provides a unique insight into what otherwise can neither be said nor heard.

Paper Short Abstract:

How might the act of 'witnessing' be perceptively narrowed, absented or weaponised by the state? Which pedagogies of witnessing are being normalised, both within bureaucratic and academic contexts? Subsequently, what forms of disability epistemologies are being practised, [re]produced or resisted?

Paper Abstract:

In this paper, I explore the sticky complexity of witnessing [and, therefore, representing] disability, both within the contexts of bureaucratic social welfare assessments, and within anthropological research itself. Primarily, I draw upon my fieldwork with recipients of the UK disability benefit ‘Personal Independence Payment’ (PIP).

PIP claimants must complete etic paperwork, as well as attend in-person assessments, to determine whether or not they are eligible for financial support. What ‘counts’ as disability is pre-determined, with claimants subsequently required to fit this category. Disability becomes once-twice-thrice removed from the textured biography of the disabled person it claims to represent. Witnessing is perceptively narrowed through form-filling, and actively weaponised through in-person assessments.

This removal of direct interaction can be described using what Kleinman, Das and Locke refer to as a ‘voyeuristic outcome of constructing suffering’ (1997: pp.xviii). The flattening of a disabled claimant’s biography against the assessor’s criteria removes the necessity for the “socio[ethical] responsibility of real engagement [with the complex dimensions of disablement]”. Rather, the absence of the PIP assessor to witness the ‘suffering’ of a disabled claimant fashions an a-social space which “[removes the] ethical demand upon those who witness it” (Throop, 2012: pp.160).

Given this significant interactional tension, I use this space to explore the following questions: what types of disability knowledge(s) are being constructed through weaponised witnessing? How might disability benefit claimants practice, [re]produce or resist this institutional gaze? Furthermore, through witnessing systemic violence, what dimensions of disability are focused upon or overlooked through the anthropological gaze?

Paper Short Abstract:

I unpack how witnessing takes shape around a police plan implemented in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Brussels (2015/2016), i.e. the ways in which documentary and affective modalities of witnessing enable to speak to different audiences and complementary seek repair and demand responsibility.

Paper Abstract:

In this presentation I unpack how witnessing takes shapes around a police plan implemented in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Brussels (2015/2016), drawing on fieldwork between 2021-2023. I unpack the ways documentative and affective modalities of witnessing speak to different audiences and do complementary work to seek repair and responsibility. The police plan targeted (Islamic) civil society organizations and mosques. While the police outputs of the plan were mediatized, the experiences of organizations passed in silence and were publicly disavowed. In response to this silence, I assembled an archive of testimonies, documents from my interlocutors and media outputs to give organizations’ experiences of surveillance a reality. Although the subject is sensitive and politically charged, my interlocutors were often ‘relieved’ to talk about their experiences because of lingering feelings of injustice and remaining questions. The actual doing of this documentative witnessing is, in this way, reparative by allowing interlocutors to share their experiences. Such documentative witnessing is key to provide the necessary ‘evidence’ and appeals to human right organizations and politicians. Inspired by Thomas’ understanding of “witnessing 2.0”, I also create an affective witnessing that enables to generate new relations, feelings and conversations (Welcome & Thomas, 2021; Thomas, 2019, 2020). To do so, I co-wrote and performed in a theater play with three fellow researchers and a local theater organization, and I also write poems. These modalities enable to affectively witness experiences of surveillance, generate conversations with wider audiences, and situate these experiences in the postcolonial conditioning of Muslims.

Paper Short Abstract:

What are the political and personal implications of ethnographic research in a field where the notions of intimacy and love meet the deadly realities of sexist violence and gendered death? Witnessing and denial can form complicated realities of feeling and understanding such social phenomena.

Paper Abstract:

In a field where the fantasies of the “good life” (Berlant, 2010) that surround heterosexuality meet the fatal economies (Bronfen, 1996, in Salecl & Zizek, 1996: 70) of intimate-partner femicides, multiple questions about how communities and subjectivities are witnessing these social phenomena, arouse. Drawing from my ongoing research project on intimate-partner femicides in Greece and based on preliminary ethnographic material, I aim to explore the ways that social witnessing can simultaneously involve the concealing of facts, legitimization of violence, and denial of its existence. In the dominant atmosphere of "unbelievability" that surrounds the discussions of femicides, communities that are witnessing femicide in their proximate cultural and social environments, seem to witness the case, while denying the event. Recognizing the undeniable "shock" of the incident, while legitimizing its roots; agreeing on the specific characteristics of the perpetrator, and relativizing the sexual and gendered culture where he belongs. These complicated forms of "seeing something" while being "blind" to something, draw their symbolic architecture from the psychoanalytic apparatus of "Oedipal syndrome". As a result, we can witness these forms of witnessing as they are emerging in the ethnographic field, aiming to critically understand the ways that they belong to wider "regimes of truth" and broader affective economies of meaning-making. Finally, the building of a queer political horizon, against heteropatriarchy and its Oediapalized subjectivizations, demands a more nuanced understanding of how subjects and communities are feeling and coping with violence and murder, especially in the cases that these, are coming from the safe "inside".