The below event comes to us from our sister program at Harvard.
Canada Program (Harvard) talk by Ron Niezen (Facebook live!)
The talk by Ron Niezen will be available on Facebook Live and later on the Weatherhead Center Facebook page (link
here):
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3
Weatherhead Forum
“Human Rights as Therapy: The Healing Paradigms of Transitional Justice in Canada”
Ronald Niezen
William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies, Canada Program.
Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy, Department of Anthropology and Faculty of Law, McGill University.
Chair: Timothy J. Colton
Chair, Canada Program Faculty Steering Committee; Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Regions in a Multipolar World; Faculty Associate; Harvard Academy Senior Scholar.
Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies, Department of Government, Harvard University.
12:00 noon to 1:15 pm EASTERN TIME
Abstract: Human rights initiatives such as peace accords, commissions of inquiry, and truth and reconciliation commissions often point to both the trauma associated with recollecting past experiences and the healing effects of doing so. Corresponding with this observation, there are two basic, irreconcilable goals behind many human rights initiatives: to produce public knowledge of the horror and trauma of gross human rights abuses and to further the goals of healing and reconciliation to overcome them. Drawing from ethnographic research on Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools, I will critically examine the healing claims of human rights. This study reveals that the therapeutic powers of human rights are not as straightforward as many have assumed, with acts of “bearing witness” sometimes associated with deep distress and failures of reconciliation.