Faculty of ArtMemory and Justice Studies Network
The Memory and Justice Studies network (MJS) offers research and learning opportunities for faculty, students, artists and activists interested in interdisciplinary research and praxis considering issues of mass violence, including war, atrocity, genocide, disaster, forced displacement, colonialism and slavery. Focused on questions on memory, social repair and transformative justice, the MJS network fosters creative and dynamic spaces for knowledge exchange and research creation.
Our goal is to create a space of research, learning and public engagement that considers how communities affected by state repression or mass violence remember loss, talk about responsibility and seek justice. The network seeks to contribute to GRSJ’s leadership in developing a transformative approach to social justice and in providing opportunities for students, activists, scholars and artists to work, research, create and act in a growing number of areas affected by mass violence.
We understand that war, genocide, displacement, slavery, disaster and settler colonialism each has its own specific historical and material manifestations and discursive formulations. By bringing into conversation different histories and approaches and critical questions about how to decolonize the scholarly, creative and practice based work on memory and justice, the network seeks to begin to establish more clearly the workings of memory and responsibility, and map conceptual and creative ways to explore the subject.
Our focus on memory and responsibility interrogates the complex and diffuse manners in which people are implicated in the maintenance of violence and what these acts of complicity reveal about the ways that systems of oppression and dispossession operate in the everyday. It further aims to understand how mass violence is connected to broader systems of colonialism and capitalist formation and how non-official and socially lead responses to violence challenge the focus on transitions and legal accountability. By acknowledging historical and ongoing violence on land and social, human and other than human worlds and the ways regimes of violence such as sexism, classism or racism are exacerbated during periods of mass violence or disaster, we locate questions of responsibility in relationship to broader systems of dispossession, colonialism, extermination and cultural genocide.
Faculty Members
Pilar Riaño, Professor, GRSJ
Erin Baines, Associate Professor, SPPGA
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Professor, GRSJ
Dory Nason, Senior Instructor, GRSJ and First Nations and Indigenous Studies
Mark Harris, Associate Professor, GRSJ
Sheryl Lightfoot, Associate Professor, First Nations and Indigenous Studies and Political Science
John Roosa, Associate Professor, History
Elizabeth Shaffer, RSHDC Director, Digital, Strategic & Indigenous Partnerships
Tricia Logan, Assistant Professor, iSchool; RSHDC Assistant Director, Research and Engagement
Graduate Students
Alejandra Gaviria, PhD Student, GRSJ
Ann Marie Hamilton, MA Student, GRSJ
Romina Tantalean, MA Student, GRSJ
Nila Ayu Utami, PhD Student, History
Juliane Okot Bitek, PhD Student, ISGP
Ayu Ratih, PhD Student, History
Denali YoungWolfe, PhD Student, Political Science
Rebekah Kartal, PhD Student, Geography
Ketty Anyeko, PhD Student, ISGP