Legality and Impunity in Times of Crisis – Symposium

How are cultures with rich oral history traditions documented and archived with care? How are “living archives” trusted to engage and preserve experiences of survivors of genocides, such as the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi? Additionally, what the approaches to oral history archiving with Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Holders, or when working with residential school survivors? How do oral history archives challenge the traditional archives composed of only written materials?

Join us online for a presentation and discussion with Duncan McCue and Elizabeth Nijdam from SCVN’s Turtle Island Research Cluster as well as and Erin Jessee and Fransiska Louwagie from the Rwanda Research Cluster, as they discuss the different approaches to archiving with oral histories.

Format:

Presentation and moderated discussion, followed by a Q&A.

Duncan McCue is an award-winning broadcaster and educator, and Associate Professor at Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication in Ottawa, ON. At Carleton, he launched the Certificate in Journalism in Indigenous Communities, a journalism skills program for learners in remote communities. He is the author of Decolonizing Journalism: A Guide to Reporting in Indigenous Communities and The Shoe Boy, a memoir of his time spent on a trapline with a Cree family in northern Quebec. Canadians know him well as a longtime CBC radio host and TV news correspondent, including host of Cross Country Checkup and the Kuper Island podcast. He previously taught journalism at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism and Toronto Metropolitan University. Duncan is a proud Anishinaabe from the Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation in southern Ontario. He is the SCVN Turtle Island Research Cluster Co-Lead collaborating with Mangeshig Pawis-Steckly to share the experiences of residential school survivor George Kenny and his son Mike Auksi.

Elizabeth “Biz” Nijdam is an Assistant Professor of Teaching and settler scholar in the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia Vancouver. She is the SCVN Research Cluster Co-Lead of Turtle Island, working with Dr. Shannon Leddy in collaboration with residential school survivor Dorothy Visser and graphic artist Natasha Donovan.

Biz’s research and teaching are grounded in the belief that popular culture is capable of both reflecting social and political discourse and intervening in it. Biz’s scholarship examines the representation of complex histories in comics and digital and tabletop games, Tarot’s capacity for innovating classroom teaching, and the role of comics and arts-based research in preserving Indigenous knowledges, sharing Indigenous storytelling traditions, and revitalizing Indigenous languages. Biz established the UBC Comics Studies Cluster in 2023, where she continues to support community partners, local nonprofits, BC’s First Nations, and UBC faculty and students in making comics about the important issues facing society today. She is also the Director of the UBC Pop Culture Cluster, which is home to the UBC Critical Play Lab, and sits on the Executive Committee of the International Comic Arts Forum. 

Erin Jessee is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where she works across the Gender History, Global History and War Studies research clusters. She has over 15 years of experience using oral historical, archival and ethnographic methods to elicit and bring into conversation people’s diverse experiences of genocide and related mass atrocities, especially in Rwanda and Bosnia. She is the author of Negotiating Genocide in Rwanda: The Politics of History and co-editor of Researching Perpetrators of Genocide and has published in Medical History, Memory Studies, Conflict and Society, History in Africa, Oral History Review and Forensic Science International, among others. She is co-leading the SCVN Rwanda Research Cluster with Dr. Fransiska Louwagie from the University of Aberdeen, working with artists Duta Ebene and Michel Kichka.

Fransiska Louwagie is a Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Aberdeen.  She took up this position in August 2022 and was previously employed at the KULeuven, where she completed her PhD, and at the University of Leicester, where she held a post as Lecturer and then Associate Professor of French. She is the author of Témoignage et littérature d’après Auschwitz (2020) and has co-edited several volumes and thematic issues, including:  Un ciel de sang et de cendres. Piotr Rawicz et la solitude du témoin (2013); Ego-histories of France and the Second World War: Writing Vichy (2018); Tradition and Innovation in Franco-Belgian bande dessinée (2021); Migration, Memory and the Visual Arts: Second-Generation (Jewish) Artists (2023), The Future of World War Two France in Academia (2026), and Henri Raczymow: sauver les noms (forthcoming). She led the AHRC-research project ‘Covid in Cartoons’, conducted in collaboration with Shout Out UK and Cartooning for Peace.

The 2026 Archiving with Care series has been organized and curated by the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives project, and facilitated by the Public Humanities Hub.

Tuesday, May 5th, 2026
10:00-11:30am PST

Registration Required to Receive Zoom Link

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