Short Abstract

Anthropology increasingly sees genocide as protracted lifeworld-destruction rather than an event. We invite work treating genocide as genocidal unweaving & antigenocidal reweaving of lifeworlds; repair, refusal, return & more-than-human relations; & limits of ‘polarisation’ amid genocide’s duration.

Long Abstract

Work on mass violence increasingly treats genocide not as a bounded episode of brutal destruction with an ‘aftermath’, but an extended structuring force against land, time, body, (more-than-) human relation, kinship, reproduction, ecology, and futurity. Ethnographies have traced how genocidal violences persist through exile and disappearances, environmental devastation and repurposing, atmospheres of fear and hostility, imposed reconciliation regimes and ideologies of memory. They have shown how forensics, courts, humanitarianism, and ‘trauma-care’ regulate whose dead become grievable, and how survival is governed through depoliticising idioms of resilience, reconciliation, and healing-as-closure.

Building on that trajectory, we invite work that treats genocide as genocidal unweaving: the targeted fraying of social, ecological, and sensorial relationalities (water, land, burial, language, kinship, ability to return) across years and generations. Concomitantly, we foreground antigenocidal reweaving: the collective and intimate, reiterative labour of refusal, care, return, and world-making that holds these relations together when repair, justice, accountability, healing, or return are structurally blocked or denied.

We welcome ethnographic, historical, legal and experimental contributions (including collaborative, poetic, audio, and multisensorial work that resists aestheticising suffering):

• tracing genocidal durations,

• examining (im)possibilities of healing, justice, repair, refusal and return, or

• following (more-than-) human relations as they are destroyed, defended and (re)woven.

Guiding questions include: How long are genocides? Which relations are targeted for unweaving, how and why? How are they rewoven? When is ‘healing’ demanded, by whom, and to what end? Can healing be a refusal of genocidal ordering? What counts as return; for whom, when? How should scholarship on genocidal violence act on ongoing annihilatory forces?

Following the conference theme of ‘polarisation’, we invite perspectives that refuse to translate genocidal directionalities into ‘conflict between sides’, instead attending to the labour of keeping worlds possible amid ongoing annihilations sustained by imperial-colonial racial ordering and hierarchies of suffering.

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