Bearing Witness: Hope for the Unseen |
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Authors: | Tamsin Jones |
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Affiliation: | 1. Trinity College, Hartford, CT, USAtamsin.jones@trincoll.edu |
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Abstract: | Beginning with an identification of the ethical and political ambivalence surrounding hope, this essay considers whether an analysis of the activity of bearing witness to truth could offer a theoretical framework for thinking about hope differently. Specifically it argues that hope can be taken as a discipline, or practice, one which is both required for, and enacted in, the act of bearing witness. Through a consideration of the process of bearing witness in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions responding to national and intergenerational trauma, the essay explores the way in which bearing witness is a fundamentally hopeful action in so far as it ceaselessly seeks to speak to the truth of an event while acknowledging the inability to ever fully capture that event in words. |
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Keywords: | Truth and Reconciliation Commissions trauma continental philosophy witnessing Kelly Oliver |
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