How-To-Guide

Witnessing as Responsibility

Witnessing emerged as a crucial practice of agency and engagement that binds individual autonomy to institutional platforms, reflective procedures and socio-political or legal change. In the context of academia and scholarship, the researcher as a witness is a tract that adds new dimensions to the debate on witnessing as a responsibility. Here the question is, if the Holocaust, or any other mass injustice, is construed as unpresentable, how is it possible to bear witness to it? What distinguishes one unpresentable, traumatic historical event, from another and renders one particular cluster open to representation through witnessing while negating such a possibility for others? The possibility of testifying to something specific when the question of unpresentability may emerge at the point of contextualizing its specificity is also a very critical one. We need to capitalize the ‘nonspecificity’ or the generic nature of what appears as the ‘unrepresentable’ in terms of the egregious nature of the acts marking the experiences we try to witness during or in the aftermath. Seeking justice requires resistance to both representation and articulation of the acts of violence that mark historical construction of specific subjectivities via violation, erasure and expulsion. Thus, the separation of the academic and the ethical should be undone.

Pedagogies of Hope and Witnessing

At the graduate level of education, capitalizing the scholar’s responsibility as a witness must aim at tackling the conundrums of scholarly research, maximizing its potential and benefits for institutional and social change, and tracing and teaching its most adequate and resonant forms. The societal function of engaged scholarship should be included in graduate education. In order to devise a remedy to the lack of such discussions, we must combine philosophical argument, methodological analysis, and cases drawn from actual scholarly practice. Overall, if we are to defend a theory of ethics that is focused on the scholar’s role in enhancing human dignity and rights against all odds, we must start with providing a road map for our students.

The role of scholars and academic work in current political and social systems has been construed much too narrowly. Graduate education squarely reflects this limited focus. A more interactive view of graduate training is not only possible but indeed highly desirable. This alternative view is characterized by knowledge mobilization (invoking, challenging and improving societal norms) as a form of legitimate activity by which the scholar/researcher uses her public authority to ask questions as well as to seek and devise answers. This form of public power, although contingent, is widely overlooked.

Consideration of the factors that influence knowledge mobilization is important for our understanding of who uses the law and for what ends, but also for deciphering implications of existing public policy frames and political institutions. The scholar/researcher could act as a witness to the demands for social and legal change coming from the society at large and particularly from the margins, and of course in ‘borderlands’, rather than as a mediator between the state and the citizenry for system maintenance and social control. However, the decision to participate in this kind of process depends in large part upon one’s sense of duty to the public and one’s realization of a unique kind of responsibility as a scholar.

Witnessing Under Turmoil

Witnessing as a scholar and its importance to transformative practices especially at times of civil strife, political upheaval and regime change are particularly acute. My aim is to concentrate on the creation of pedagogical conditions necessary for students working with human vulnerabilities to become critical witnesses to violence, systemic rights violations, suspension of civil legal order, political and personal trauma and society-wide oppression and from an intersectional vantage point. There are important ethical and political possibilities that emerge through such efforts. These in turn could extend our thinking about the affective possibilities of witnessing as a methodological component in research and scholarship.

Discontents of Traditional Academia

In our work as scholars and researchers, we must be able to offer a progressive approach that could potentially boost our capacities for caring, and an idea of equality that captures the kind of vision based on the recognition of shared humanity and human dignity of non-citizens, alien subjects and stateless populations. Traditional takes on academia view the relevance and scholarship of ethics in this larger sense as prosaic, although it is an issue of profound social and political significance, and will impact our professional and personal lives as well as the future of the societies within which we produce and disseminate knowledge. Deficient education on the issue of ethics of witnessing as responsibility has serious consequences for all parties involved in cases of harm to the public and public institutions’, including universities’, tendency to protect the status quo. The cultural, political and social challenges faced by vulnerable individuals, groups, classes and communities in the society must inform the scholarship and pedagogy of forced migration research in a very unmediated fashion due to the very subject matter falling under the purview of this area of expertise. Furthermore, there must be a very direct acknowledgement of the gendered nature of these systemic practices of exclusion, denunciation, decimation and annihilation of human lives.

The fundamental understanding of the ways in which identity, race, historical trauma, gender and class impact legal practices, in part by impeding access to remedies must be an essential part of training students. Weaving themes of violence, history, identity and class together, we can offer an expansive take on socio-economic and socio-cultural awareness of those who will ‘go into the field.’ In this changed context, academic education becomes a platform upon which inequalities and injustices are discussed openly rather than presumed to be falling outside the capabilities of the scholar to engage with.

For teaching and working with narratives of traumatic events and cases of political or socio-economic violence on a curricular basis, it is important to explore how both educators and students could embrace a new understanding of responsibility that encourages an alternative affective, ethical, and political approach to injustice. Such a response would move beyond reactive responses to trauma and would consider alternative meanings of narratives about human suffering, thus rendering the classroom as a venue for debate, critical understanding as well as affect-based engagement.

Affect-Based Learning

Both fear and terror are the kinds of emotion that are deeply affective. Sociality borrows its potency from inter-relationality. In this specific context of method as intervention, affect acts as an amplifier and yet it is also the most fragile of all forms of relating. Discussions and theories on the politics of affect constitute a particular approach to gendered political violence that is to replace the generally more preferred terminology that is used to depict war, displacement and dispossession. Although both drives and affects are influential in individual choices, affect has a nuanced social and cultural history without which it is not possible to understand the true nature of power relations in society. Politics of affect allow us to tell and to hear specific stories and these stories localize but also humanize the experiences of ‘subjects of scholarly research’ at times of upheaval and mass suffering rather than allowing for observation from a safe and critical distance.

Institutional accountability, acknowledging vulnerability and ethics of witnessing put to use in the context of death, disappearance, displacement and dispossession removes the counting of the dead and disappeared bodies away from the kind of erudite vouyerism with no responsibility. Lack of cognizance of victimhood as a result of which accountability is suspended means no dignity for those who are ‘observed’ while living in a limbo, under lockdown, during periods of normalization of exceptionality and that very condition renders law, justice and responsibility null and void for those who are the chosen subjects of academic interrogation.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse