Category: resources

How Can Visual Narratives Disrupt Traditional Conceptions of Testimony?

From January to November 2024, the University of British Columbia’s Public Humanities Hub co-hosted the Art and Testimony webinar series with the University of Victoria’s Survivor-Centered Visual Narratives project. The series brought together researchers, artists, historians, non-profit directors and other professionals to discuss how different mediums of artistic production can function as a form of testimony.

Building on the conversations, practices, and resources shared during the six webinars, SCVN is excited to announce the Art and Testimony Toolkit based on the webinar series. The toolkit includes recordings and transcripts of each of the six webinars categorized by three thematic clusters: 1) Performance as Testimony; 2) Videotaped Interviews, Graphic Novels and Comics as Testimony; and 3) Teaching through Visual Testimony. The toolkit also includes notes, commentary, illustrations, references and quotes that complement each webinar.

The toolkit is available on the UBC Public Humanities Hub website here.

Art and Testimony Webinar Series

The webinar series explored a wide range of artistic forms from live performance to graphic novels to newspaper comics, the series sought to highlight the power of testimony to tell stories in a unique way. For instance, Dr. Henry “Hank” Greenspan in the webinar ‘Listening, Telling, Showing (and Back)’ underlines how he sought to resist the ‘conventional’ testimonial approach by engaging in dialogue rather than extraction. By returning to the same survivors over months and even years, Hank sought to reconnect and develop the survivors’ stories as they pieced together parts of their memories, often evolving their own narratives.

In a similar vein, several webinars touched on how drawn narratives leave space for imagination and creation, both for those giving the testimonies and the researchers working with them. Barbara Yelin’s collaboration with Holocaust survivor Emmie Arbel demonstrates how drawn narratives function as a tool for engaging with memories that defy easy articulation. Developed initially from just seven pages of notes, their book, Emmie Arbel: Die Farbe der Erinnerung, grew out of what they called “puzzle memory work,” where they sought to hold space for the linearity of memory.

The webinar series emphasized how visual narratives have the potential to disrupt traditional testimony collection practices, which often favour language over image. In response, the toolkit builds upon our expert speakers’ knowledge and resources, and suggests various visual mediums and approaches to arts-based research methodologies for understanding survivor experiences.

SCVN would like to extend a warm thank you to all those who contributed to developing the toolkit. Special thanks to the author, Serikbolsyn Tastanbek; advisors, Heather Joan Tam, Jennifer Sauter, Charlotte Schallié, and Andrea Webb; technical support, Stanley Chia; illustrator, Raey Costain; and transcribers, Lucie Kotesovska, Kate Kristianson, Henri Jefferis, and Claire Fenton. The toolkit would have never come together without the hard work and dedication of the team.

To view the Art and Testimony Webinar Series, please click here.

From April to November 2023, the Public Humanities Hub at the University of British Columbia co-hosted with the University of Victoria’s Survivor-Centered Visual Narratives project a webinar series on the Ethics of Trauma-Informed Research. The series of zoom conversations featured researchers, educators, journalists, artists and other professionals focusing on trauma in their work. The toolkit is accessible on the UBC’s Public Humanities Hub website and builds on the experience, practice, and resources shared by these experts during the six webinars of the series.

The speakers’ experiences and perspectives regarding trauma in the aftermath of genocide, mass atrocities, war, and other events vary considerably, but, as this toolkit documents and emphasizes, the central focus remains the same. According to Ying Han and Sydney Lines, the authors of the toolkit, it is “overcoming the ‘trust’ gap between community and researchers, and approaching the research with ethics of care” which represents the main concern shared by all guests in the webinar series regardless the variable terminology they might use when they talk about their research and professional practice. ‘Survivor-centered approach’, ‘people-centered approach’, ‘grassroots approach’, ‘participatory research’, and ‘co-produced research’ are used in the toolkit to refer to the central concern and methodology.

The toolkit contains the recordings of the original webinars as well as the transcript of each of the sessions and is organized into four thematic clusters: Trauma-Informed Research as Witnessing, Trauma-Informed Research as Pedagogy, Trauma-Informed Methods of Public Scholarship, and Trauma-Informed Research and Arts-based Methods. Each of these clusters introduces and explores a particular method of trauma-informed research discussed in the webinar conversations via brief summaries of the key points and the experts’ own words. Further, each cluster points to resources available at the UBC and beyond that might be of help to those who wish to explore and apply the given methodology in their own trauma-informed research.  

Infographics by Raey Costain.

Rather than “mapping out trauma on a diagnostic level”, the main focus and motivation of this toolkit is documenting the variety of experience-based research approaches to trauma. This emphasis allows its readers to consider how this type of research can help open up pathways to post-traumatic growth and resilience, and it also draws attention to the fact that this type of research often causes emotional or psychological discomfort or distress for subjects, participants, collaborators, and researchers alike. As the authors emphasize, “it is incumbent upon researchers and practitioners to build in ways to cultivate an awareness of the possible trauma responses that participants may experience, anticipate the risks of re-traumatization, and to learn how to hold space for recovery and care for all parties involved”. The Trauma-Informed Research Toolkit is exactly the place where to start when looking for possible guidance and inspiration.

To access the toolkit on the UBC Public Humanities Hub website, please click here: https://sites.google.com/view/trauma-informed-research

To learn more about the project’s webinar series “Ethics of Trauma-Informed Research” and “Art and Testimony”, please click here.