Charlotte Schallié Lecture: To Draw Darkness…and Light: Visual Storytelling Research and Practice with Survivors of Genocide and Mass Atrocity

In this presentation, Professor Charlotte Schallié (University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada) will discuss emerging insights from Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives (www.visualnarratives.org), an arts-based research project that pairs comics artists with survivors of genocide and mass atrocity. Stories have the power to connect us and to remind us of the experiences we hold in common. Interlinking the graphic novel medium with scholarship in collaborative life writing and relational ethics, the Survivor-Centered Visual Narratives project engages arts-based relational storytelling as a foundational principle for gathering genocide and mass atrocity testimonies. Gently shifting away from a trauma paradigm that engages survivor memory as a site of irreparably inflicted psychic wounds, the SCVN project hold space for therapeutic healing, reciprocity and care.

For more information, contact Ari Richter at arichter@lagcc.cuny.edu.