Evening Plenary: WITNESSING, RECOGNITION, AND ACCOUNTABILITY: The Ethics and Politics of Multi-Modal Scholarship

WITNESSING, RECOGNITION, AND ACCOUNTABILITY: The Ethics and Politics of Multi-Modal Scholarship

During the 2010 State of Emergency in West Kingston, Jamaica, security forces entered the community of Tivoli Gardens in order to capture Christopher "Dudus" Coke, who had been ordered for extradition to the United States. Officially, 74 civilians were killed during this operation, but the number community members give is closer to 200. Since 2012, I have been working collaboratively with Junior Wedderburn and Deanne Bell on a multi-modal project addressing these events. We have been assembling archives – including drone footage, archival footage, still and moving images of the contemporary landscape, still and video portraiture, and narratives. We are interested in how these assemblages bring into being a range of affective orientations, themselves differently apprehended based on one's location (politically, structurally, nationally, and psychically). What forms of recognition might be possible across these various locations? How might the archives we've developed either generate them or make them unrealizable? In this talk, I will think through these questions as they redound to relationships between form and audience, ethics and politics.