This event is part of the Ethics of Trauma-Informed Research Webinar Mini-Series co-hosted by the University of Victoria’s Visual Storytelling and Graphic Art in Genocide and Human Rights Education project and the UBC-V Public Humanities Hub.
In this webinar, Dr. Kjell Anderson will reflect on the dilemmas he has encountered in his current research project on Dominic Ongwen, a former child soldier with the Lord’s Resistance Army who was recently convicted of crimes against humanity and war crimes by the International Criminal Court. Ongwen’s trial brought out diverse and nuanced perspectives on perpetrators and victims of mass atrocities, while reconstituting those narratives for the purposes of criminal accountability. It also showed many faces of human rights, as a hegemonic discourse valorizing victims and condemning villains, as a process of justice of justice-making, and as a lens to understand the complex web of suffering that characterizes the conflict in northern Uganda.
Hosted by Dr. Andrea Webb, Associate Professor of Teaching, UBC Curriculum & Pedagogy, and Dr. Matt Huculak, Digital Scholarship Librarian, University of Victoria.
Thursday, November 2, 2023
9:00-10:15 AM Pacific Time
Online via Zoom
Speaker Bios
Kjell Anderson is a criminologist and legal scholar specialized in the study of mass atrocities. He is the director of the Master of Human Rights program at the University of Manitoba, as well as an assistant professor of law. He is the co-editor, with Erin Jessee, of Researching Perpetrators of Genocide (University of Wisconsin Press 2020), and the author of Perpetrating Genocide: A Criminological Account (Routledge 2018), as well as numerous scholarly articles on genocide, mass atrocities, international criminal law, and transitional justice. He has held academic posts at the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, the National University of Ireland, the University of the Fraser Valley, and the National University of Rwanda, and positions in human rights NGOs, think tanks, and international organizations. He is the former vice president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars and a current member of the Board of Directors of the Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention. His current research project is a book on the life and ICC trial of, former child soldier and Lord’s Resistance Army commander, Dominic Ongwen (The Dilemma of Dominic Ongwen, Rutgers University Press, forthcoming 2021).