Fratricide and Fraternité: Outputs
The Sawyer Seminar Series consisted of several complementary components:
• A two-day opening conference on “Fratricide” and a two-day closing conference on “Fraternité”
• a series of six afternoon seminars on “Neighbourly Denunciation”; “Perpetrators/Bystanders/Rescuers”; “Drawing Lines”; “Neighbours Revisited”; “Truth, Justice, and Reparations”; “The Everyday Afterwards”
The series brought together a highly eclectic, multi-national, and multi-disciplinary group of internationally renowned scholars (e.g. Jan Gross and Eva Hoffman), early career scholars (e.g. Kirstin Bakke and Andrew Schaap), a distinguished lawyer (Geoffrey Robertson, QC), two documentary filmmakers (Anne Aghion and Refik Hodzic), an artist (Yvonne Kyriakides), and a director of museum exhibits (Suzanne Bardgett). The closing conference also included several cultural events: a poetry reading by Michael Symmons Roberts, a verbatim theater piece (an extract from “Asylum Dialogues”) by the Ice and Fire company, and an art exhibition of the work of Holocaust survivor Joseph Bau (co-hosted with the Wiener Library).
The Series was open and accessible to the public and it attracted faculty, researchers, and graduate students from the School and the wider University of London (e.g. School of African and Oriental Studies, University College London, Birkbeck College, Kings College London, London School of Economics, Goldsmiths, and Royal Holloway); practitioners from Human Rights Watch and other nongovernmental organizations; and interested members of the public. A core group of interested scholars attended many of the events, which helped sustain a high-level of discussion and helped elaborate the themes of the series.
Dr Lars Waldorf, the Principal Organiser, is currently working on a journal article related to the themes of the Series. In addition, Eva Hoffman invited Dr Waldorf to present a paper based on the themes of the Series at a British Council-funded conference in New Delhi in March 2011. The Principal Organizer and Fellows have discussed putting together an edited collection or special journal issue based on the series and have approached several of the conference participants, who have expressed interest in contributing.
The Mellon grant award helped spur the creation of the Human Rights Consortium at the School in 2009, and the Consortium, in turn, provided oversight of the series. The Consortium brings together the multi-disciplinary expertise in human rights found in several SAS institutes. The principal activities of the Consortium consist of holding conferences and seminars, hosting visiting fellows, coordinating publication of human rights research, and establishing a network of human rights researchers, policymakers, and practitioners across the UK and internationally.
