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Research seminar by Dr Maria Alejandra Estrada-Fuentes

Dr Estrada-Fuentes is an applied theatre practitioner and an academic based at the Universiteit van Amsterdam and University of Warwick. She is a co-investigator with professor Alison Ribeiro de Menezes (PI) on the international research project "Towards a Moral Grammar of Transitional Justice: Secondary Care Practices to Support Conflict Transformation in Colombia", a public–private partnership between the University of Warwick (UK), Los Andes University and the Reincorporation and Normalization Agency (Colombia). Her work is concerned with developing processes for reintegrating 'complex victims' into the post-conflict society.

How can performance contribute to repairing the emotional legacies of war crimes? This project develops new methodological approaches to reparation in transitional societies by studying the role of complex-victims – individuals who harm yet are also harmed themselves – and the symbolic and embodied elements of ex-combatants in post-conflict reintegration. Restorative Reintegration addresses the gendered-dimensions of complex-victim reintegration by focusing on the social reintegration of female ex-combatants of guerrilla organisations who have been subject to sexual and gendered violence within the ranks of military organisations they belonged to, and how transitional justice mechanisms (reintegration programmes, truth commissions, judicial processes) deal with these experiences.

Studying the gendered-dimensions of complex-victim reparation and reintegration, the research grapples with the broader historical factors and structural inequalities that inform violent conflict and shape post-conflict processes. In so doing, this project develops new understandings of the interplay between reparations and complex-victimhood, with special consideration of the role of applied theatre, performance, embodiment and art practice as central elements of conflict transformation, policy-making and implementation. This engagement with the arts will innovate and develop new languages to address and work through experiences of violence in transitional contexts. The proposed research argues for a relational-approach to reparation that systematically unsettles victim/perpetrator binaries in order to address the complexity of responsibility and reparations rooted in the structural and historical dimensions of harm in situations of armed conflict.


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Tuesday 29 January

4.15pm

MU202