Communicating Human Rights and Transitional Justice: Evolutions in Narratives, Voices, and Spaces

Communication is integral to research and practice in human rights and transitional justice; it shapes how we understand, mobilise, legitimise, and resist/challenge both the experiences and the study of injustice. What we communicate—and how we do so—plays a pivotal role in shaping the contours of recognition and accountability, as well as in determining possibilities within and across these fields. Communicating intrinsically involves choices: who speaks or transmits to which audiences, what discursive and linguistic language is used, and through what vehicle or medium communication occurs. These choices raise crucial questions of agency, accessibility, and representation, as the carefully chosen presences and carefully chosen absences of a narrative determines whose voice, experience and rights matter as well as whose does not. As channels and modes of communication continue to diversify, traditional forms increasingly intersect with art, music, film, literature, and social media. These intersections are creating new spaces where a multiplicity of voices can articulate and amplify their perspectives through unconventional and creative means. This year’s section on ‘Communicating Human Rights and Transitional Justice’ invites panel and paper proposals interested in the ways in which human rights and transitional justice are, have been, and could be, communicated. Potential topics include, but are by no means restricted to: • Narratives and counter-narratives: how do official narratives of human rights abuses and transitional justice experiences interact with vernacular narrative spaces? • Silences, erasures, and absences: whose voices and experiences are marginalised through the limitations in communication within and across human rights and transitional justice? How are these voices resisting this? How are “new” voices emerging? • Popular culture and media: in what ways do popular culture, visual media, and artistic practices expand and amplify, as well as distort and corrode, spaces for, and narratives of, human rights and transitional justice? • Language and representation: which language(s) are used to communicate human rights and transitional justice, and are those languages representative of the audience? Who is included in the communication strategy and, conversely, who is excluded? • Memory, archives, and futures: how do practices of remembering, archiving, and imagining shape the communication of human rights and transitional justice? Which forms of communication preserve, transform, or contest collective memory and historical narratives? • Interdisciplinary and methodological questions: how do we approach communication in research design, ethics, and dissemination, in similar and different ways across disciplines and practices within the fields of human rights and transitional justice? The Section Co-Chairs wish to encourage Early Career Researchers as well as established scholars to participate in ECPR General Conferences and Workshops. This section aims to place scholars at different stages of their career in conversation with each other, in order to encourage, inspire and challenge a new generation of political scientists. As in previous years, the Co-Chairs aim to create an intellectual community during the ECPR General conference, allowing for inspiring conversations and exchanges throughout the section’s consecutive panels and beyond (e.g. through joint publication projects after the conference, such as blog contributions or a Special Issue).