‘Planting Seeds of Justice’ – Reflections from the AGM by Marie-Chantal Plouff
Guest blog reflection by Marie-Chantal Plouff
From June 10 to June 12, 2026, I had the opportunity to attend the annual meeting of the Survivor-Centered Visual Narratives (SCVN) project at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights(CMHR) in Winnipeg, Canada. Over the course of three days, I was reminded that the work of human rights education extends far beyond the finished products that eventually reach a classroom. Behind every story, every graphic novel, every lesson plan, and every conversation about the past is an enormous network of people whose contributions may never be visible to the final audience.
The SCVN project uses arts-based and trauma-informed research to honour the diverse and unique voices of genocide survivors. At its core is a difficult but important balance: recognizing the universal condemnation of mass atrocities while remaining attentive to the historical, cultural, and political contexts in which different communities experienced them. By bringing together survivors, artists, researchers, educators, community liaisons, and other collaborators, the project creates space for dialogue across distinct memory communities while centering survivor agency.
The broader goal is not simply to document the past. It is to develop new methodologies for remembering and teaching about past crimes, contribute to future prevention, and support communities as they continue to navigate the wounds left by mass violence. I joined this project as a research assistant, working specifically on the development of educational materials for high school teachers and students across Canada. My task has been to help make these materials accessible, engaging, and trauma-sensitive, with the broader objective of encouraging human rights education in Canadian classrooms.
For months, my work has largely consisted of sitting with words: considering how information should be presented, how difficult histories can be introduced responsibly, and how educational materials can invite students into conversations about human rights without reducing complex experiences to simple lessons. Attending the annual meeting changed how I understood that work.
Seeing the Invisible Labour
One of my strongest realizations throughout the meeting was the sheer amount of invisible labour behind a project like SCVN. When students eventually encounter a graphic novel in their classroom, they will experience the story as a finished object. They will never see the research meetings, revisions, negotiations, consultations, educational planning, artistic discussions, or countless hours of preparation that made that moment possible.
The survivors’ stories are, rightfully, at the centre of the project. Yet, surrounding those stories is an entire community of people working to ensure that they are represented responsibly and meaningfully. These are researchers, educators, artists, graphic designers, translators, community liaisons, students, administrators, and many others contributing to the process. Some of us may be working closely with the graphic novelists and survivors, while others are several steps removed from them. Yet all these contributions are part of the same chain.
This was particularly meaningful to me because my role is one of those less visible pieces. I am focused primarily on educational content rather than the visual production of the graphic novels themselves. I am not drawing the stories or designing their pages. However, during the meeting, a graphic designer was present virtually to visually translate our discussions in real time. Watching our conservations become images was unexpectedly powerful.
Ideas that had existed only as words on a page or as discussions around a table suddenly had a visual form. The drawings captured not only the substance of our conversations but also something of the atmosphere in which they were taking place. They made visible the collective effort behind the project and, in a sense, gave shape to the invisible labour we were all contributing.
There was something almost magical about watching the seriousness of our discussions coexist with moments of humour, creativity, and collaboration. We were engaging with histories of genocide, violence, displacement, and profound human suffering. The work is heavy but we were also a group of people helping one another carry that weight.
Truth, fact, and the role of visual storytelling
Another particularly insightful part of the meeting was a guest session with Shayna Plaut, the Director of Research and Exhibition Development at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which prompted us to think about how graphic novels challenge traditional assumptions about neutrality, objectivity, and historical fact. One idea that stayed with me was the notion that “truth is greater than fact.”
At first, this may seem counterintuitive. When discussing historical atrocities, surely facts are essential, but the discussion pushed us to consider the difference between factual accuracy and the broader truth that emerges when we try to understand human experiences. Comics and graphic novels occupy an interesting space in this regard. They are not simply repositories of historical information. They are interpretive and visual forms of storytelling. They create a shifting space of consensus in which readers encounter history through images, dialogue, perspective, emotion, and narrative. This makes the responsibility of the project even greater.
The purpose is not to replace facts with interpretation, but to ground interpretation in truthful and responsible representations of lived experiences. It is an approach that recognizes how teaching about mass violence requires more than providing students with a list of dates and events. It requires creating opportunities for students to understand the human dimensions of these stories.
The people who make stories possible
Perhaps the most important connection across all our roles was the opportunity to witness the survivors’ stories themselves. During the meeting, we had the opportunity to view the Yezidi and Syrian short films and to hold the Two Roses graphic novel in our hands for the first time. We also met individuals who serve as essential intermediaries between the project team and the survivors whose stories we are helping to bring into educational spaces. Their role cannot be understated.
I was struck by the amount of negotiation and care involved in the process of transforming lived experiences into a form that can eventually be shared with students. Survivors’ community liaisons, researchers, and artists must continually navigate questions of representation, trust, accuracy, and agency. The process is not simply a matter of asking someone to tell their story and then reproducing it. There is a relationship that must exist first.
Individuals such as Leyla Ferman (Iraq/Syria Research Cluster) demonstrate the importance of what I would describe as a “kinship of trust,” a form of relationship that cannot simply be established through academic credentials. Trust is built through relationships, cultural understanding, time, listening, and accountability. This was an important reminder that human rights research cannot be separated from the people who make it possible. Academic knowledge alone is not enough. Neither is artistic ability. The work depends upon relationships and upon the willingness of people to entrust others with parts of their histories.
What does human rights education actually look like?
One evening, we stepped outside the CMHR and made our way to the Forks, where we participated in a Human Rights classroom-style panel featuring individuals who had written and published graphic novels. I was struck by their creativity and talent, but I was equally surprised by the complexity of teaching itself.
It is easy to think of teaching as the final step: the material has been created and now someone simply delivers it to students. Educators and authors working with these subjects must understand their audiences. They think about student cultures, classroom dynamics, emotional responses, attention spans, existing knowledge, and the difficulty of introducing subjects that can be deeply painful or uncomfortable. They wear multiple hats. They become authors, researchers, storytellers, and educators all at once.
This experience made me rethink what “human rights” can mean. Too often in my role, human rights is approached through a narrow legal or institutional framework. Treaties, courts, legislation, declarations, and international organizations are essential, but they are not the entirety of human rights. Human rights can also be conversational, visual, emotional, accessible, and adaptable.
They can exist in a classroom discussion, in a graphic novel, in a story shared between generations, or in a students’ first realization that something they have learned about history is connected to the world around them. That realization is particularly important for the work I am doing. My responsibility is not merely to make educational content easier to understand, it is to help create a bridge between difficult histories and the students who will encounter them.
Remembering without competing
Another conversation that followed us throughout the meetings concerned how audiences might respond to the stories represented in the graphic novels. This question is particularly important in a world where contemporary events can create intense political, cultural, and emotional attachments to communities and their suffering. There was a strong consensus around the importance of avoiding competitive victimization.
The purpose of the project is not to create a hierarchy of suffering as we are not telling these stories to suggest one community’s experience is more important, more tragic, or more deserving of recognition than another. Instead, these stories should challenge us to recognize a common thread: these are all examples of profound human rights violations that should never happen again. Each community’s history remains distinct. We should not erase those differences in the name of universality but recognize that distinct experiences do not require us to rank them.
Perhaps the most important lesson is precisely that we can remember different histories simultaneously.
Planting seeds of justice
I want to end this reflection with Duncan McCue’s powerful idea of “planting seeds,” seeds of empathy, understanding, and human transformation. The three days I spent at the SCVN annual meeting ultimately felt like an exercise in planting seeds of justice.
I arrived thinking primarily about my role in this project: the educational materials I was developing and how I could make them accessible and appropriate for Canadian classrooms. I left with a much broader understanding of the ecosystem that surrounds that work.
I saw the artists translating conversations into images. I saw the educators thinking carefully about how students would receive difficult histories. I saw the community liaisons building relationships of trust. I saw researchers wrestling with questions of truth, representation, and memory. Most importantly, I saw the survivors’ stories whose experiences give the entire project its purpose.
The meeting reminded me that our contributions do not have to be equally visible to be equally meaningful. Sometimes, our work exists several steps away from the people who will ultimately experience its impact. We may never know the student who picks up one of these graphic novels years from now, reads a survivor’s story, and begins to think differently about history, discrimination, or their responsibility toward others. That possibility is precisely why the work matters.
For me, the experience also reframed my understanding of what I am creating as it is not simply accessible and flexible classroom materials. I am participating in the retelling and preservation of truth at a time when information can be manipulated, distorted, or forgotten with extraordinary ease. That responsibility is both daunting and inspiring.
The people involved in the Survivor-Centered Visual Narratives project are planting seeds. We are planting them with purpose and direction. By telling stories responsibly, listening to survivors, creating spaces for difficult conversations, and giving students the tools to understand the past, we can help create the conditions for something different in the future.
Sometimes, justice begins with something as small as planting a seed. The seed of human rights may be as small as a mustard seed, almost imperceptible when first planted, but its potential is immeasurable. Our responsibility is to plant them with care, with truth, and with the hope that one day they will grow into something much larger than any one of us could have imagined.
Students attending the ‘Drawing Justice’ panel on June 11, 2026. Photo credit: Maddy Rafnson.
