Between Violence and Its Representation: Ethics, Archival Research, and the Politics of Knowledge Production in the Telling of Torture Stories

Authors

  • Teresa Macías School of Social WorkYork University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.48336/IJNKRS1029

Keywords:

archives, archival research, ethics, representational violence, Foucault

Abstract

This paper explores the ethics of archival research by reflecting on the challenges of doing research with highly descriptive and gruesome archived testimonies of torture. This reflection leads me to unpack the character of archives and research as power/knowledge devices that at their very core imply violence: a violence of representation enacted in the representation of violence. I propose that the inseparable representation-violence relationship requires that we situate ourselves in the narrow, hazardous, and ever-shifting space between violence and its representation in order to turn representation into a performative, discursive, and self-constituting ethics in which we can engage in political and strategic practices of representation.

Author Biography

Teresa Macías, School of Social WorkYork University

Teresa Macias has a PhD from the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at OISE-University of Toronto. Her PhD Thesis entitled "On the Pawprint of Terror": The Human Rights Regime and the Production of Truth and Subjectivity in Post-Authoritarian Chile traces 20 years of history in the development of Chilean state policy to deal with human rights abuses. Her work deals with issues of disappearances, torture, truth commissions and compensation policy. Her research and teaching interests also include professional and research ethics, nation and identity making, and anti-oppressive and anti-colonial practice and teaching methods. She is currently conducting research on the Canadian Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

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Published

2016-02-02