November 20, 2024 • 39 mins
In this last episode of Series 1 of Humanities at Large, Kamari Maxine Clarke joins host Melissa Gismondi for a discussion about Clarke's work on absences in historical knowledge and archives, particularly in the context of Black and Indigenous lives. They explore Clarke's interest in documenting and making visible forms of knowledge and memory that are often rendered invisible or unintelligible, such as oral histories, stories, and everyday experiences. She advocates for more interdisciplinary and imaginative approaches to exploring knowledge and social memory, including the use of "critical fabulation" to fill in gaps in the historical record. She also discusses her work analyzing the use of satellite imagery and other technologies to document human rights abuses, noting the limitations of these tools in capturing the deeper structural and historical contexts of violence. Kamari Maxine Clarke was one of the JHI's 2023-24 Faculty Research Fellows and her research project examined the problem of absence-presence in the Black Atlantic World.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
(upbeat African drums)
- On a warm evening back in June,
I joined dozens of other people
in a small art galleryon Queen Street West
in downtown Toronto.
We were watching a performance
by the Adinkra Farm Ensemble
(00:21):
led by master drummer Quammie Williams.
(upbeat African drums continue)
The event marked the endof a week long program
that brought togetherscholars, historians,
and policy makers from around the world
with local artists and musicians.
It was organised in part by today's guest,
(00:43):
Kamari Maxine Clarke.
(soft music)
Kamari is the distinguished professor
of Transnational Justice
and Sociolegal Studies atthe University of Toronto.
She's also a formerFaculty Research Fellow
at the Jackman Humanities Institute.
(01:05):
The program was called,
Memory Lab (01:07):
Difficult Archives, Difficult Memories,
Transformations in Blackand Indigenous Worlds.
And like much of Kamari's recent work,
it was concerned with absences
in what's considered knowledge,
the problem of whose stories get told
and who gets to decide.
- The Memory Lab, it'sabout the sensorium.
(01:29):
It's about how people recall
and not just recall individualand personal memory,
but what we do with social memory.
What do we do with memoriesthat are difficult to claim?
And we're interested in those things
that are often rendered invisible.
(01:50):
They're not even part of the archive,
because they're not rendered intelligible.
And so, I'll just give you an example
because the focus is on Black
and Indigenous lives in some ways,
and there are particularities there,
especially in the Canadianand North American context.
So often historically,
we may think about ship records
that were connected totransatlantic slavery,
(02:12):
and those ship records would document
those who were enslaved,
who were held captive,
and document them whothey are as unitary beings
that are commodities.
But you don't have the everyday lives,
you don't have the stories,
you don't have thetexture of the everyday.
And these are difficult memories.
I mean, in general, thepast is a difficult thing
(02:35):
to retrieve and especially in context
where people aren't rendered human.
- Kamari isn't justinterested in what's missing
from the historicalarchive, as she sees it,
the gaps in what we knoware actually opportunities
presenting new pathways for understanding
the world and each other.
- There's another componentwhich is about possibility,
(02:58):
and it's about how youtransform those things,
how you envision it differently.
And it celebrates innovation.
So possibility, it's aboutwhat you imagine differently,
how you tell a story otherwise,
how do you tell a storythat is fragmented?
How do you cobble it togetherto make it meaningful?
And many times it involvesdrawing on the everyday resources
(03:20):
that you know,
that speak to an individual experience,
because you can't possibly knowthe interior life of people
who operated in the past.
You can't possibly know.
But there are ways that youcan creatively think about
what it must have been like
and ways that you canloop that into the present
to make sense of where we go from here.
(03:42):
(soft music)
- I'm Melissa Gismondi,
and this is Humanities at Large
from the Jackman Humanities Institute
at the University of Toronto.
Over the course of this season,
I've been exploring the themeof absence through the work
of JHI researchers.
(04:03):
Kamari Maxine Clarke
studies absences in knowledge.
I spoke with Kamari back in June,
about two weeks beforethe Memory Lab took place.
Later in the show,
you'll hear her thoughtson how it all went,
but in our first conversation,
I asked her to walk methrough the foundations
for her thinking aboutknowledge and social memory.
(04:27):
When it comes to what we know,
she's identified three core problems,
- So knowledge, method, and transmission.
So knowledge is about what we know
and what we render legible and visible
and worthy of seeing something in a way
that is instrumental that can allow us
(04:48):
to teach and to learn.
And that can be rendered legitimate.
So some examples of thatmight be things like
parables or adages and stories.
And often one of thethings we see with people
around the world is that these adages,
often it's elders or even young people use
(05:11):
to teach each other about values,core values, about ethics,
about the human condition,
about what the appropriateway to act if you're angry
and what the consequencesof those things might be.
And some of the work that we're doing
around knowledge productionand decolonial knowledge
is by rendering visible these adages,
(05:31):
in a way what we're sayingis that they have their logic
and their logic is embeddedin a set of experiences
that are actually quitesophisticated in thinking
about the human condition.
And so we have to render it visible.
We have to document it.
We have to use it as a worthy domain
for understanding a given group of people
(05:51):
who are using thoseadages in everyday life.
So knowledge is one of the first problems
that we have to deal with.
The second, so it has to do with methods.
The problem of method.
Of course, the social science
and positivism has predominated so much
of the modes through which we understand
(06:12):
and analyze our worldin the social sciences.
So the idea that when you doan interview with someone,
that person is all knowing.
And so you ask them aquestion, their answer is,
is a comprehensive understanding
of their interior world
as if the liberal subjectis fully knowable.
(06:33):
And so part of the problem with positivism
and with the rise of theall-knowing liberal subject
is that actually there's much more
that we don't know than we know.
And the interior world of a person
and the contradictions within,
aren't fully knowable
by just asking a question
(06:54):
or even observing what they're doing.
And these are the methods
and part of positivist knowledge making,
the presumption of rationality,
that individuals are rational subjects.
You ask them a question,they give you an answer,
and then you decode it.
Life is far more complex
and it's also even morecomplex when you think
about the more than human worlds, right?
(07:16):
Once we start talkingabout Indigenous lives
and African worlds and the idea
that there are deitiesand there are ancestors,
and people believe that they are with us
and they commune withthem, and they communicate
and things mean things thataren't visible to everyone.
How do you document thatand pay attention to that?
(07:39):
And in some instances,
people might be ashamedof even raising it,
or it might not be part of the interview
in a methodological sensebecause they presume that,
okay, you're not interested in that.
That's my other world.
I'll answer your question.
Yet there's a wholeother world that operates
in people's lives and itraises methodological problems
(08:00):
about the human, the centralityof the human, when in fact,
so many people live on multiple horizons
in multiple worlds at once.
And so this is the problem of method.
And then the third is around transmission.
Some people talk about it,
like our radical humanismcollective often likes to think
(08:21):
of it in terms of representation.
So what gets representedby whom, what is the genre?
Written text is also
often privileged
or what we see the document and visuality,
those optics are often privileged
what gets published
(08:43):
and transmitted through publishing houses.
What is limited in that way.
So these questions oftransmission, it's about power,
it's about political economy.
It's about the overdependence
on the visual and the writtentext and less on orality.
And it raises problems about then
what circulates in the world.
And so those three components
(09:04):
are key problems around the archive,
the contemporary archive,
and a significant amount of conversation
and thinking around absenceand the archive is underway.
And it's very exciting at this point that
so many scholars and students
and collaborators arethinking about these questions
and really trying to offer alternatives.
(09:28):
- You mentioned earlier
sort of what the absence can do in terms
of art and storytelling
and finding different ways tosort of represent knowledge
and different kinds of knowledge.
And your upcoming programis designed to sort
of really explore that,as you were saying,
to address those gaps in the archives.
I understand part of thissort of draws on the concept
(09:50):
of critical fabulation,
which was coined by the American writer
and scholar Saidiya Hartman.
Can you walk me through this idea
and what about it sort ofspeaks to you and inspires you?
- Yeah, critical fabulationhas exploded in the world
in a way that is so productive
(10:11):
and that gives us licence
to imagine and to innovate.
So critical fabulation is,
it presumes that
everything in our life is complex.
That there are fragments to everyday life,
to all of our lives, to the past,
to the present and whatthe future becomes.
(10:33):
And so the question is how do we then
pull together those pieces of that past
and how do we make sense
of the present when wehave imperfect information?
Of course, in Black Atlantic worlds,
there's a particular cadence
because of the history of the plantation,
because of the lack of archives.
(10:54):
But it's really an invitation in general
to think about the every day
and what you do with imperfect knowledge
and what licence can wegive ourselves to improvise
and innovate with whatwe have and what we know.
And some of that involvesputting ourself in the process
of cobbling together the way
(11:15):
that we think about the future
and what we think about the present.
And it's a brilliant way ofcreating an otherwise, right?
It's a move from positivism.
It's a move from the idea
that there is a empiricaltruth and reality,
and that it's a linearone and it's objective
and that we all know itand we all experience
(11:37):
and we all can observe it.
The reality is that in any one moment,
we all have different perceptions
and experiences of the same thing
and whose rendition gets to count?
There's some things that we can agree on,
and then there are otherthings that deviate from that.
And so critical fabulationgives us the opportunity
(11:59):
to fabulate differently,to put things together,
to put together the puzzle
in a way that allows for improvisation,
that allows us to take pieces
of some of what we know andconnect it with the patterns
of what we can predict
and also to imagine other possibilities.
And it's really the coming together
of those three things that is powerful.
(12:24):
- So I trained as aearly American historian,
and then when I was in graduateschool, Annette Gordon-Reed
"The Hemingses of Monticello,"
was a big book that we read
and studied and it felt likeeven then she was pushing
the envelope of historical imagination,
which is about a lot of it.
A good chunk of it isabout Sally Hemmings,
the woman who was enslavedby Thomas Jefferson.
(12:47):
But I'm curious sort of,you know, where the line is
for you in terms of the innovation.
'Cause I can imagine somehistorians especially,
or some scholars probablysay this is getting
close to fiction.
Like where's the line between, you know,
quote unquote history and fiction
(13:09):
and when is imagination used too much?
Have you come across those critiques
and what would be your response to that?
- I think that one of the things
that is important in educationis critical thinking.
(13:29):
And if we can't
give each other
and our students the tools
for thinking critically about our lives,
then we've really
not fully
imparted the kind of an education
that's necessary to live in a world
and in a world wherethere's so much difference,
there's so much variation,there's so much strife.
(13:54):
And so what critical fabulation
and approaches to creativity
around the past allow us,
is it allows us to think
critically about thethings we just do not know.
To think about what the conditions
of enslavement musthave been for a person,
is a key question.
(14:14):
And critical thinkingrequires that we think,
well, what are the contextin which this is happening?
What are the conditions?
How was the person sold?
Are there documents of their sale?
Where was the house?
Where's the location?
When was the Revolutionary War?
When was the Civil War?
I mean, there are a lot of facts
that historians would agreeon as sort of, you know,
(14:36):
key components
and there are a lot ofthings that we don't know,
but critical thinking comes in,
because it allows us to thinkabout what we don't know
and then to put ourselves in a context
in which we can innovate and we can,
using the information that we do know,
imagine what particularthings might have been like,
and to theorize them andto conceptualize them
(14:58):
and also to map out alternatives.
So what if she did A, what if she did B,
what would be the consequences of C?
And where do we go from here?
And I think it's really critical thinking
that is key here andit's certainly something
that I'm committed to in the classroom.
- So then would it be fair to say
(15:19):
that a sort of healthy vibrant discipline
allows space for that creativity?
- Yeah.- Yeah.
- Absolutely.
It allows space for the creativity.
It allows us to interrogateand pose particular questions
and see how we answer those questions.
And it opens a discussion about the ways
that we've answered those questions.
(15:40):
And sometimes we have torethink the answers to those,
or at least think about who we are
and why we were indebtedto a particular trajectory
and what would it look like
to take on a different trajectory
and why is
that other trajectory not evenin the scope of possibility.
I think being able to ask
(16:01):
what are the conditionsunder which certain things
are possible and what are the conditions
under which we can't evenimagine those other things,
are really instrumental
in thinking about power,in thinking about history,
in thinking about culture
in thinking about social transmission.
And so that's what I mean whenI'm saying critical thinking
(16:22):
that that imaginationand innovation and modes
and methodologies thatthat really allow us
to zigzag around
some of the things
that we have documentation for.
They allow us to ask different questions
and that are productive in so many ways.
(16:44):
- It sounds like it also allowsa little bit of humility in,
'cause I don't know that it's,
that I often hear scholarssay, I don't know,
or even write in a book,I don't know the answers
to these questions.
- That book would stay on the shelf.
- But what you're describing, I mean,
that's the kind ofdiscipline I'm excited by.
That allows space for the I don't know,
(17:05):
but what about this, maybe this.
- Oh, absolutely, yeah.
And in conversations I thinkpeople more inclined to say,
well, I don't know, butthese are the things
that I am thinking about.
A publisher I don't think would.
- Not yet, maybe.
- Would go for it, yeah.
Actually it would be aninteresting title for a book.
I don't know.
(17:29):
(soft music)
- When it comes to knowledge,
universities I think are oftenseen as authority figures,
and as we've been discussing,
your work really challenges the belief
that traditional frameworks,
including the humanities,are comprehensive sources.
(17:52):
And you recently posed the question,
what would 21st centuryscholarship look like
if it abandoned the commitment
to problematic binaries,objects, and cannons,
and instead explored new archives
of knowledge in orderto chart new futures.
I'm curious how you would answer that.
What comes to mind for youwhen you hear that question?
(18:18):
- How much time do we have?
- We have as much time as you wanna take.
- Oh, really?
As much.
That's a big one.
But maybe what we can do in thinking about
the social sciences
and contemporary universitiesis really to think about
the opportunities that we haveto teach with our syllabi,
(18:40):
the ways that we divide knowledge.
Often part of the problemis the discipline itself.
The idea of a disciplinethat has its canon,
that has its presumptions
and that's distinctfrom another discipline,
when in fact the disciplineis a recent invention
(19:01):
in the ways that we understand knowledge.
The ways that we map outour syllabi as faculty
needs to be rethought,
needs to be thought intention.
So there are some historical texts
that might continue to be important,
but many of them should beread alongside other things
that were happening in theworld, that are happening.
(19:22):
Whether someone is a historianor if someone's a philosopher
or if someone is a modern artist,
there are ways to teach complexity across
the so-called perceiveddistinct disciplines.
And it's really only until we're able
to combine the different modesof learning and understanding
and interconnecting things,
that we can start
(19:43):
to think differently aboutwhat knowledge really is,
and allow ourselves tothink beyond the limits
of the discipline.
In the social sciences we should be
teaching not only themethods and methodologies,
but also science fiction, also fiction,
other modalities that are being used
to express the very same issues.
(20:03):
So the culture of povertyisn't just about dispossession
and loss and grievances.
It's about joy and laughterand the stories people tell
and the creative and endearing ways
that they call each other names.
The adages that are used to tell stories,
to teach people that the culture
of poverty is about so many things.
(20:24):
But if we focus on the data
and the statistics thatunemployment rates and violence
and police killings, weonly see half of the story.
But if we bring in these other modalities
that allow us to open up
what knowledge aboutthese spaces might be,
it would allow us to tella very different story.
(20:45):
- Bringing together expertsfrom different fields
is precisely what Kamari did
with the Memory Lab back in June.
The closing night event featuredperformances from poets,
dancers and musicians, includingthe Adinkra Farm Ensemble,
who you heard earlier.
(upbeat African drums)
When the music started,
those of us in the audiencesat politely and watched,
(21:07):
a few of us nodding ourheads or tapping our feet.
But then master drummer Quammie Williams
suddenly stopped playing.
- If you are going
to participate in this experience,
you cannot sit there with your legs folded
(21:29):
and your arms folded.
I am not,
we are not an academicexercise for observation.
(people laughing)
Okay?
So let's do it again.
I'm going to give you anopportunity to behave like people.
(21:51):
As a matter of fact,you know what, get up.
Stand up, stand up, stand up, stand up.
Don't be afraid.
Stand up.
Stand up, okay.
(upbeat African drums)
- That was a interesting moment
(22:11):
because the artist, Quammie Williams,
called people to get up and dance,
that he will not continue to perform
unless we engage in themaking of music together.
And it was a phenomenal moment
because the room transformedinto one of consumers
to people who areparticipating in the making
(22:31):
and engagement with music.
And it was a wonderful example of that
and a memorable moment,
in that process, involvedbutterflies in the spirits,
Indigenous dancers, eight, nine of them
at the front stage sort of dancing
to this African music ina way that was seamless
(22:53):
and collaborative andreally, really beautiful.
So yeah, that was an interesting lesson,
I think in many ways.
- Yeah, it was, theroom changed completely.
It was like there was anelectricity. How did the week go?
How are you feeling now that it's over?
- It was a wonderful weekand it was exhilarating.
(23:19):
It was creative.
There were significantamounts of spontaneity
and really, I think a lot of trust.
We came up with a wordthat in many ways pushed us
beyond the themes that we identified
as the core themes.
(23:41):
And it was the word alchemy
and alchemy really wasabout the coming together
and transformation ofthings into other things.
And it really was aboutthe way that stories
of the past transform into memories
that actually have the potentialto become something else.
(24:03):
(soft music)
- I asked Kamari aboutanother important project
she's been working on.
It's also about broadeningthe scope of knowledge,
but in a very different sense.
(24:25):
The project looks at the use
of satellites over conflict zones
to gather photographic evidenceof humanitarian crimes.
It's something thatgovernments, prosecutors,
and human rights groups,
are doing more and more,
especially in regions thatare difficult to access.
While it might sound prettystraightforward using cameras
(24:47):
to document evidence ofcrimes, as Kamari explains,
it's not always that simple.
There's a lot that's missingfrom the camera's frame.
- Of course it has todo with what is visible.
It has to do with what you cansee and what you cannot see.
And I was involved ina number of projects,
(25:07):
one project with the US State Department
and another project that was funded
by the National Science Foundation
and another with the SocialScience Council of Canada.
And it funded a collaborativeproject for thinking about
how the popular uses ofthese geospatial technologies
with neighbourhood scientists,you know, mothers who,
(25:30):
you know, if you think about in Mexico,
over 8,000 people have been disappeared
as a result of the Civil War.
In Nigeria, over 8,000 in a given year
have been disappearedand killed, murdered,
because of whether it's political violence
or farmer-herder crisis and other things.
(25:51):
And so you have thesehuman rights mobilizations
where people are trying
to desperately use thesenew technologies to try
to determine what is happening,how do we prevent it,
how do we make responsible
and accountable those whoare committing those crimes?
And so they're using thesetechnologies to do that,
but it's not straightforward,of course, as you can imagine.
(26:11):
It's not simply a matter of seeing
and knowing that this person is culpable.
And so the key question that we ask
is what is the evidentiary basis
on which this new human rights
revolution is deploying technologies?
What are they trying to document?
What are they seeing andwhat are the challenges
with what can be seen?
(26:33):
Because everything isn't seeable.
And often the legal question is a question
of immediate and approximate violence.
Who committed the crime?
Who shot the gun, who killed?
And how do we hold that personresponsible, when in fact,
one of the things that our research showed
was that what is beyond the scope
(26:54):
or the scopic regime, wecalled it the scopic regime,
this regime of knowledge.
And often we depend on whatwe can see within the scope
of what is visible,
but what is often invisible
are the longer term,
the longue durée of structural conditions
that actually set theconditions for violence
(27:15):
in the first place.
- So you mentioned thefarmer-herder crisis in Nigeria,
and I wonder,
that I think is a good example
that really illustratessome of your concerns
and what you're talking about.
Could you just sort of, Iknow it's a very, you know,
complicated crisis.
Could you just sort of brieflyoutline the current tensions
between the two groups in Nigeria
(27:37):
and then what is rendered absent
and invisible through these technologies
in that particular context?
- The farmer-herder crisis in Nigeria
is not unlike a lot of crises around land
in a lot of places in the world.
And in this case with herders,
you often have peoplewho tend to be nomadic,
(28:01):
who for hundreds of years,thousands of years, in fact,
their lineage has takentheir cattle along grazing
paths to the market, to sell,
to engage in trade.
And historically there were grazing paths.
So the land, the cattlecould eat along the paths.
(28:24):
Increasingly land laws
were put in place
that encroached on those grazing paths
and moving land from the people
and ownership of the peoplefor all to share to land owned
by the crown to landowned by the governor.
- The British crown.
- The British crown, beforeamalgamation in 1914,
(28:47):
- A quick refresher, inthe late 19th century,
as part of the expansion ofEuropean empires into Africa,
Britain established twocolonial territories.
The northern and southernNigerian Protectorates.
Initially kept separate,
they were merged toform one state in 1914.
(29:07):
With the merger came thecontinued subordination of people
with nomadic lifestyles
and a system of land tenurethat privileged farmers
and further displaced northern herders.
- And then by independence in 1960,
you have a whole set
of other jurisprudentialdecisions around land.
(29:28):
And increasingly what youhave is the increasing
privatization of land
and the decrease ingrazing paths for herders,
to the extent that farmers, who,
many of whom are actuallyvery impoverished people,
people who if they have abad crop in a given year,
(29:49):
they will starve, right?
There's no resources.
Their livelihood, the children,
everyone depend on the harvest.
And if animals, cows, etcetera,
trample on the very livelihoodthat is all they have,
then of course you havethe basis for strife.
And historically there were ways
that people negotiated those things.
(30:10):
Something called the Berti system
where there were relationshipsthat if something was
trampled, you pay for the loss.
And over time thosethings became constricted,
the ways that peoplerelated to each other.
The antagonisms grew
with the increasingly difficult
and offensive laws thateventually governors
(30:33):
came to manage.
And today what you have
is a volatile crisis in which thousands of
people are being killed aroundsome of these land-based...
that have only been accentuated
and made more difficult by land laws.
- And so the technology ishelping to, well, in one respect,
(30:56):
it's helping to providethe sort of imagery,
evidence of
what exactly?
- Yeah, it's called a EWER system.
So it's early warning, early response.
And one of the projects that I worked on
and around which over 300 communities
(31:18):
and people organized,
had to do
with the predictivecapacity of the technology.
So often during thatperiod, there were burnings.
So sometimes it was retaliatory.
So say the farmers, something happened,
they shot some of the cattle,
the herders would go back
and report back to their group,
(31:40):
and then that groupwould go back to the farm
and might retaliate.
And sometimes thatretaliation involved burning,
burning down of villages.
And then people would haveto run for cover, for safety.
And you had these cycles of violence,
often a lot of burning.
And so the geospatialtechnologies would trigger,
(32:00):
the algorithm actuallywould trigger burning.
So the way that it was written,
it could detect the burning,
and within 10 to 20 hours,
community members would get the alert
that there's a burning.
And at that point, thegoverning council would meet
what we call the EWER forum,
and they would determinewhat they should do.
So there's a burning, dowe flee, do we negotiate,
(32:22):
do we fight, do we protectourselves, do we stay put?
And those deliberationswould have to happen.
And that's the revolutionarypiece of that work
in many ways,
it's putting in place amechanism for thinking about
what the nature of that violence is
and what the appropriate response is.
(32:43):
Not just pick up a gun andfight and engage in retaliation,
but it's what are the resourcesthat are available to us
around which we can negotiate differently
or around which we could end this cycle
and put in place a newarrangement in this community.
And so people have been doing that work.
(33:04):
The problem with the emancipatory nature
of this kind of deliberation
is that on one hand,
the algorithm triggers fire and people act
and they make progressive decisions about
how they should proceed.
On the other hand,
the question is stillabout proximate violence.
Who did it?
(33:24):
What should we do?
How do we flee?
And oftentimes it's not about longer term
responses as well as thelongue durée in which
that violence is happening.
And many legal questionsaren't about that longue durée,
they're about proximate violence.
Who did it?
(33:44):
What do we do?
How do we proceed?
Because people are tryingto save their lives.
But our work is also...
we were interested indocumenting these kind
of progressive social mobilizations,
but also one of thethings that we saw is that
what gets missed is otherthings that are outside
of that scopic regime thataren't just about the law
(34:06):
and who did what and culpability,
they're about a whole set of other things
that have to do with histories of land law
and displacement and dispossession.
- The colonial history
that you were talking about earlier, yeah.
- Colonial and the post-colonial.
The colonial just transferred right
into the post-colonial after independence.
- Because you mentioned for the farmer,
(34:26):
it can be their livelihood that's gone.
If a cattle, you know, ruins a crop,
same thing I'm assuming
for a herder, if someoneshoots their cattle,
that's their livelihood as well.
- Absolutely, absolutely.
So it's both what's outside of the scope,
why is it that we havethat structural condition
in the first place,
and how did laws enable that?
And how do we rectify thatfrom land dispossession
(34:49):
to a different compensation, you know,
a different way
of redistributing land thathas not yet been rectified
in the post-colonial state.
- Going forward, how would you like
to see this technology used in a way
that could maybe betteracknowledge the history
of this structural violence
and some of the root causes of conflict?
(35:10):
Is there a way it could be paired
with other kinds of evidence?
- Yeah, it's a question thatI've thought about a lot,
and that gives me,
sometimes when I thinkthrough those questions,
I think, oh, I need a million dollars.
Because the ideal is to bring together,
it's the collaborative work.
(35:32):
It's to bring togethercomputer programmers,
it's to bring together geographers,
it's to bring together historians,
it's to bring together analysts.
It's to bring together architects
in a room to design
progressive analytic software
(35:52):
and tools that actually can allow us
to think complexly about the nature
of violence in our world.
And we see some models for this.
SSRC has an interestingproject called Just Tech,
which tries to fund the wholeperson to bring together teams
of people to work on key projects.
(36:13):
And every year, I think,they fund about six projects
that are collaborative.
And we desperately needmodels for thinking.
I mean, a computer programmerwho is just looking for fire,
is going to actually missso many other things.
If you're just looking for fire
and you equip village peopleto respond to the fire,
(36:34):
how do you then make senseof people who have hundreds
of years of dispossessionon the other hand?
So you equip some people with the tools
and the laptops and the technologies,
and then others who may be contributing,
to the problem may be responding to it,
and are themselves victims of it,
(36:56):
don't have those tools necessarily.
How do we then think about those longer,
the longue durée ofviolence in the region?
And so I think part of what we need
is responsible tech that can allow us
to ask more than thequestion, who is culpable?
Looking for a singleperpetrator of violence.
It's not just, violence isnot just about the individual
(37:17):
person that carries out the act,
it's about the deeper questions,about those conditions,
those longer conditions inwhich those things came to be
that way some 90 years later.
(soft music)
- Kamari Maxine Clarke isthe distinguished professor
(37:40):
of Transnational Justice
and Sociolegal Studies atthe University of Toronto
at the Centre for Criminologyand Sociolegal Studies,
and the Centre for Diasporaand Transnational Studies.
She's also a former JHIFaculty Research Fellow.
(38:02):
And that wraps up the very first season
of Humanities At Large,
a podcast from the JackmanHumanities Institute
at the University of Toronto.
Special thanks to AlisonKeith, Kimberley Yates,
Sonja Johnston, MonicaToffoli, Cheryl Pasternak,
and Katy Swailes.
If you enjoyed this episode,
(38:22):
be sure to share it witha friend or colleague.
And if you missed any ofmy previous conversations
with JHI researchersinvestigating questions
around the theme of absence,
all six episodes are available now.
Don't forget to leaveus a five star review.
I'm Melissa Gismondi.
Thanks for listening.
(38:44):
(soft music)
(upbeat African drums)
- On a warm evening back in June,
I joined dozens of other people
in a small art galleryon Queen Street West
in downtown Toronto.
We were watching a performance
by the Adinkra Farm Ensemble
(00:21):
led by master drummer Quammie Williams.
(upbeat African drums continue)
The event marked the endof a week long program
that brought togetherscholars, historians,
and policy makers from around the world
with local artists and musicians.
It was organised in part by today's guest,
(00:43):
Kamari Maxine Clarke.
(soft music)
Kamari is the distinguished professor
of Transnational Justice
and Sociolegal Studies atthe University of Toronto.
She's also a formerFaculty Research Fellow
at the Jackman Humanities Institute.
(01:05):
The program was called,
Memory Lab (01:07):
Difficult Archives, Difficult Memories,
Transformations in Blackand Indigenous Worlds.
And like much of Kamari's recent work,
it was concerned with absences
in what's considered knowledge,
the problem of whose stories get told
and who gets to decide.
- The Memory Lab, it'sabout the sensorium.
(01:29):
It's about how people recall
and not just recall individualand personal memory,
but what we do with social memory.
What do we do with memoriesthat are difficult to claim?
And we're interested in those things
that are often rendered invisible.
(01:50):
They're not even part of the archive,
because they're not rendered intelligible.
And so, I'll just give you an example
because the focus is on Black
and Indigenous lives in some ways,
and there are particularities there,
especially in the Canadianand North American context.
So often historically,
we may think about ship records
that were connected totransatlantic slavery,
(02:12):
and those ship records would document
those who were enslaved,
who were held captive,
and document them whothey are as unitary beings
that are commodities.
But you don't have the everyday lives,
you don't have the stories,
you don't have thetexture of the everyday.
And these are difficult memories.
I mean, in general, thepast is a difficult thing
(02:35):
to retrieve and especially in context
where people aren't rendered human.
- Kamari isn't justinterested in what's missing
from the historicalarchive, as she sees it,
the gaps in what we knoware actually opportunities
presenting new pathways for understanding
the world and each other.
- There's another componentwhich is about possibility,
(02:58):
and it's about how youtransform those things,
how you envision it differently.
And it celebrates innovation.
So possibility, it's aboutwhat you imagine differently,
how you tell a story otherwise,
how do you tell a storythat is fragmented?
How do you cobble it togetherto make it meaningful?
And many times it involvesdrawing on the everyday resources
(03:20):
that you know,
that speak to an individual experience,
because you can't possibly knowthe interior life of people
who operated in the past.
You can't possibly know.
But there are ways that youcan creatively think about
what it must have been like
and ways that you canloop that into the present
to make sense of where we go from here.
(03:42):
(soft music)
- I'm Melissa Gismondi,
and this is Humanities at Large
from the Jackman Humanities Institute
at the University of Toronto.
Over the course of this season,
I've been exploring the themeof absence through the work
of JHI researchers.
(04:03):
Kamari Maxine Clarke
studies absences in knowledge.
I spoke with Kamari back in June,
about two weeks beforethe Memory Lab took place.
Later in the show,
you'll hear her thoughtson how it all went,
but in our first conversation,
I asked her to walk methrough the foundations
for her thinking aboutknowledge and social memory.
(04:27):
When it comes to what we know,
she's identified three core problems,
- So knowledge, method, and transmission.
So knowledge is about what we know
and what we render legible and visible
and worthy of seeing something in a way
that is instrumental that can allow us
(04:48):
to teach and to learn.
And that can be rendered legitimate.
So some examples of thatmight be things like
parables or adages and stories.
And often one of thethings we see with people
around the world is that these adages,
often it's elders or even young people use
(05:11):
to teach each other about values,core values, about ethics,
about the human condition,
about what the appropriateway to act if you're angry
and what the consequencesof those things might be.
And some of the work that we're doing
around knowledge productionand decolonial knowledge
is by rendering visible these adages,
(05:31):
in a way what we're sayingis that they have their logic
and their logic is embeddedin a set of experiences
that are actually quitesophisticated in thinking
about the human condition.
And so we have to render it visible.
We have to document it.
We have to use it as a worthy domain
for understanding a given group of people
(05:51):
who are using thoseadages in everyday life.
So knowledge is one of the first problems
that we have to deal with.
The second, so it has to do with methods.
The problem of method.
Of course, the social science
and positivism has predominated so much
of the modes through which we understand
(06:12):
and analyze our worldin the social sciences.
So the idea that when you doan interview with someone,
that person is all knowing.
And so you ask them aquestion, their answer is,
is a comprehensive understanding
of their interior world
as if the liberal subjectis fully knowable.
(06:33):
And so part of the problem with positivism
and with the rise of theall-knowing liberal subject
is that actually there's much more
that we don't know than we know.
And the interior world of a person
and the contradictions within,
aren't fully knowable
by just asking a question
(06:54):
or even observing what they're doing.
And these are the methods
and part of positivist knowledge making,
the presumption of rationality,
that individuals are rational subjects.
You ask them a question,they give you an answer,
and then you decode it.
Life is far more complex
and it's also even morecomplex when you think
about the more than human worlds, right?
(07:16):
Once we start talkingabout Indigenous lives
and African worlds and the idea
that there are deitiesand there are ancestors,
and people believe that they are with us
and they commune withthem, and they communicate
and things mean things thataren't visible to everyone.
How do you document thatand pay attention to that?
(07:39):
And in some instances,
people might be ashamedof even raising it,
or it might not be part of the interview
in a methodological sensebecause they presume that,
okay, you're not interested in that.
That's my other world.
I'll answer your question.
Yet there's a wholeother world that operates
in people's lives and itraises methodological problems
(08:00):
about the human, the centralityof the human, when in fact,
so many people live on multiple horizons
in multiple worlds at once.
And so this is the problem of method.
And then the third is around transmission.
Some people talk about it,
like our radical humanismcollective often likes to think
(08:21):
of it in terms of representation.
So what gets representedby whom, what is the genre?
Written text is also
often privileged
or what we see the document and visuality,
those optics are often privileged
what gets published
(08:43):
and transmitted through publishing houses.
What is limited in that way.
So these questions oftransmission, it's about power,
it's about political economy.
It's about the overdependence
on the visual and the writtentext and less on orality.
And it raises problems about then
what circulates in the world.
And so those three components
(09:04):
are key problems around the archive,
the contemporary archive,
and a significant amount of conversation
and thinking around absenceand the archive is underway.
And it's very exciting at this point that
so many scholars and students
and collaborators arethinking about these questions
and really trying to offer alternatives.
(09:28):
- You mentioned earlier
sort of what the absence can do in terms
of art and storytelling
and finding different ways tosort of represent knowledge
and different kinds of knowledge.
And your upcoming programis designed to sort
of really explore that,as you were saying,
to address those gaps in the archives.
I understand part of thissort of draws on the concept
(09:50):
of critical fabulation,
which was coined by the American writer
and scholar Saidiya Hartman.
Can you walk me through this idea
and what about it sort ofspeaks to you and inspires you?
- Yeah, critical fabulationhas exploded in the world
in a way that is so productive
(10:11):
and that gives us licence
to imagine and to innovate.
So critical fabulation is,
it presumes that
everything in our life is complex.
That there are fragments to everyday life,
to all of our lives, to the past,
to the present and whatthe future becomes.
(10:33):
And so the question is how do we then
pull together those pieces of that past
and how do we make sense
of the present when wehave imperfect information?
Of course, in Black Atlantic worlds,
there's a particular cadence
because of the history of the plantation,
because of the lack of archives.
(10:54):
But it's really an invitation in general
to think about the every day
and what you do with imperfect knowledge
and what licence can wegive ourselves to improvise
and innovate with whatwe have and what we know.
And some of that involvesputting ourself in the process
of cobbling together the way
(11:15):
that we think about the future
and what we think about the present.
And it's a brilliant way ofcreating an otherwise, right?
It's a move from positivism.
It's a move from the idea
that there is a empiricaltruth and reality,
and that it's a linearone and it's objective
and that we all know itand we all experience
(11:37):
and we all can observe it.
The reality is that in any one moment,
we all have different perceptions
and experiences of the same thing
and whose rendition gets to count?
There's some things that we can agree on,
and then there are otherthings that deviate from that.
And so critical fabulationgives us the opportunity
(11:59):
to fabulate differently,to put things together,
to put together the puzzle
in a way that allows for improvisation,
that allows us to take pieces
of some of what we know andconnect it with the patterns
of what we can predict
and also to imagine other possibilities.
And it's really the coming together
of those three things that is powerful.
(12:24):
- So I trained as aearly American historian,
and then when I was in graduateschool, Annette Gordon-Reed
"The Hemingses of Monticello,"
was a big book that we read
and studied and it felt likeeven then she was pushing
the envelope of historical imagination,
which is about a lot of it.
A good chunk of it isabout Sally Hemmings,
the woman who was enslavedby Thomas Jefferson.
(12:47):
But I'm curious sort of,you know, where the line is
for you in terms of the innovation.
'Cause I can imagine somehistorians especially,
or some scholars probablysay this is getting
close to fiction.
Like where's the line between, you know,
quote unquote history and fiction
(13:09):
and when is imagination used too much?
Have you come across those critiques
and what would be your response to that?
- I think that one of the things
that is important in educationis critical thinking.
(13:29):
And if we can't
give each other
and our students the tools
for thinking critically about our lives,
then we've really
not fully
imparted the kind of an education
that's necessary to live in a world
and in a world wherethere's so much difference,
there's so much variation,there's so much strife.
(13:54):
And so what critical fabulation
and approaches to creativity
around the past allow us,
is it allows us to think
critically about thethings we just do not know.
To think about what the conditions
of enslavement musthave been for a person,
is a key question.
(14:14):
And critical thinkingrequires that we think,
well, what are the contextin which this is happening?
What are the conditions?
How was the person sold?
Are there documents of their sale?
Where was the house?
Where's the location?
When was the Revolutionary War?
When was the Civil War?
I mean, there are a lot of facts
that historians would agreeon as sort of, you know,
(14:36):
key components
and there are a lot ofthings that we don't know,
but critical thinking comes in,
because it allows us to thinkabout what we don't know
and then to put ourselves in a context
in which we can innovate and we can,
using the information that we do know,
imagine what particularthings might have been like,
and to theorize them andto conceptualize them
(14:58):
and also to map out alternatives.
So what if she did A, what if she did B,
what would be the consequences of C?
And where do we go from here?
And I think it's really critical thinking
that is key here andit's certainly something
that I'm committed to in the classroom.
- So then would it be fair to say
(15:19):
that a sort of healthy vibrant discipline
allows space for that creativity?
- Yeah.- Yeah.
- Absolutely.
It allows space for the creativity.
It allows us to interrogateand pose particular questions
and see how we answer those questions.
And it opens a discussion about the ways
that we've answered those questions.
(15:40):
And sometimes we have torethink the answers to those,
or at least think about who we are
and why we were indebtedto a particular trajectory
and what would it look like
to take on a different trajectory
and why is
that other trajectory not evenin the scope of possibility.
I think being able to ask
(16:01):
what are the conditionsunder which certain things
are possible and what are the conditions
under which we can't evenimagine those other things,
are really instrumental
in thinking about power,in thinking about history,
in thinking about culture
in thinking about social transmission.
And so that's what I mean whenI'm saying critical thinking
(16:22):
that that imaginationand innovation and modes
and methodologies thatthat really allow us
to zigzag around
some of the things
that we have documentation for.
They allow us to ask different questions
and that are productive in so many ways.
(16:44):
- It sounds like it also allowsa little bit of humility in,
'cause I don't know that it's,
that I often hear scholarssay, I don't know,
or even write in a book,I don't know the answers
to these questions.
- That book would stay on the shelf.
- But what you're describing, I mean,
that's the kind ofdiscipline I'm excited by.
That allows space for the I don't know,
(17:05):
but what about this, maybe this.
- Oh, absolutely, yeah.
And in conversations I thinkpeople more inclined to say,
well, I don't know, butthese are the things
that I am thinking about.
A publisher I don't think would.
- Not yet, maybe.
- Would go for it, yeah.
Actually it would be aninteresting title for a book.
I don't know.
(17:29):
(soft music)
- When it comes to knowledge,
universities I think are oftenseen as authority figures,
and as we've been discussing,
your work really challenges the belief
that traditional frameworks,
including the humanities,are comprehensive sources.
(17:52):
And you recently posed the question,
what would 21st centuryscholarship look like
if it abandoned the commitment
to problematic binaries,objects, and cannons,
and instead explored new archives
of knowledge in orderto chart new futures.
I'm curious how you would answer that.
What comes to mind for youwhen you hear that question?
(18:18):
- How much time do we have?
- We have as much time as you wanna take.
- Oh, really?
As much.
That's a big one.
But maybe what we can do in thinking about
the social sciences
and contemporary universitiesis really to think about
the opportunities that we haveto teach with our syllabi,
(18:40):
the ways that we divide knowledge.
Often part of the problemis the discipline itself.
The idea of a disciplinethat has its canon,
that has its presumptions
and that's distinctfrom another discipline,
when in fact the disciplineis a recent invention
(19:01):
in the ways that we understand knowledge.
The ways that we map outour syllabi as faculty
needs to be rethought,
needs to be thought intention.
So there are some historical texts
that might continue to be important,
but many of them should beread alongside other things
that were happening in theworld, that are happening.
(19:22):
Whether someone is a historianor if someone's a philosopher
or if someone is a modern artist,
there are ways to teach complexity across
the so-called perceiveddistinct disciplines.
And it's really only until we're able
to combine the different modesof learning and understanding
and interconnecting things,
that we can start
(19:43):
to think differently aboutwhat knowledge really is,
and allow ourselves tothink beyond the limits
of the discipline.
In the social sciences we should be
teaching not only themethods and methodologies,
but also science fiction, also fiction,
other modalities that are being used
to express the very same issues.
(20:03):
So the culture of povertyisn't just about dispossession
and loss and grievances.
It's about joy and laughterand the stories people tell
and the creative and endearing ways
that they call each other names.
The adages that are used to tell stories,
to teach people that the culture
of poverty is about so many things.
(20:24):
But if we focus on the data
and the statistics thatunemployment rates and violence
and police killings, weonly see half of the story.
But if we bring in these other modalities
that allow us to open up
what knowledge aboutthese spaces might be,
it would allow us to tella very different story.
(20:45):
- Bringing together expertsfrom different fields
is precisely what Kamari did
with the Memory Lab back in June.
The closing night event featuredperformances from poets,
dancers and musicians, includingthe Adinkra Farm Ensemble,
who you heard earlier.
(upbeat African drums)
When the music started,
those of us in the audiencesat politely and watched,
(21:07):
a few of us nodding ourheads or tapping our feet.
But then master drummer Quammie Williams
suddenly stopped playing.
- If you are going
to participate in this experience,
you cannot sit there with your legs folded
(21:29):
and your arms folded.
I am not,
we are not an academicexercise for observation.
(people laughing)
Okay?
So let's do it again.
I'm going to give you anopportunity to behave like people.
(21:51):
As a matter of fact,you know what, get up.
Stand up, stand up, stand up, stand up.
Don't be afraid.
Stand up.
Stand up, okay.
(upbeat African drums)
- That was a interesting moment
(22:11):
because the artist, Quammie Williams,
called people to get up and dance,
that he will not continue to perform
unless we engage in themaking of music together.
And it was a phenomenal moment
because the room transformedinto one of consumers
to people who areparticipating in the making
(22:31):
and engagement with music.
And it was a wonderful example of that
and a memorable moment,
in that process, involvedbutterflies in the spirits,
Indigenous dancers, eight, nine of them
at the front stage sort of dancing
to this African music ina way that was seamless
(22:53):
and collaborative andreally, really beautiful.
So yeah, that was an interesting lesson,
I think in many ways.
- Yeah, it was, theroom changed completely.
It was like there was anelectricity. How did the week go?
How are you feeling now that it's over?
- It was a wonderful weekand it was exhilarating.
(23:19):
It was creative.
There were significantamounts of spontaneity
and really, I think a lot of trust.
We came up with a wordthat in many ways pushed us
beyond the themes that we identified
as the core themes.
(23:41):
And it was the word alchemy
and alchemy really wasabout the coming together
and transformation ofthings into other things.
And it really was aboutthe way that stories
of the past transform into memories
that actually have the potentialto become something else.
(24:03):
(soft music)
- I asked Kamari aboutanother important project
she's been working on.
It's also about broadeningthe scope of knowledge,
but in a very different sense.
(24:25):
The project looks at the use
of satellites over conflict zones
to gather photographic evidenceof humanitarian crimes.
It's something thatgovernments, prosecutors,
and human rights groups,
are doing more and more,
especially in regions thatare difficult to access.
While it might sound prettystraightforward using cameras
(24:47):
to document evidence ofcrimes, as Kamari explains,
it's not always that simple.
There's a lot that's missingfrom the camera's frame.
- Of course it has todo with what is visible.
It has to do with what you cansee and what you cannot see.
And I was involved ina number of projects,
(25:07):
one project with the US State Department
and another project that was funded
by the National Science Foundation
and another with the SocialScience Council of Canada.
And it funded a collaborativeproject for thinking about
how the popular uses ofthese geospatial technologies
with neighbourhood scientists,you know, mothers who,
(25:30):
you know, if you think about in Mexico,
over 8,000 people have been disappeared
as a result of the Civil War.
In Nigeria, over 8,000 in a given year
have been disappearedand killed, murdered,
because of whether it's political violence
or farmer-herder crisis and other things.
(25:51):
And so you have thesehuman rights mobilizations
where people are trying
to desperately use thesenew technologies to try
to determine what is happening,how do we prevent it,
how do we make responsible
and accountable those whoare committing those crimes?
And so they're using thesetechnologies to do that,
but it's not straightforward,of course, as you can imagine.
(26:11):
It's not simply a matter of seeing
and knowing that this person is culpable.
And so the key question that we ask
is what is the evidentiary basis
on which this new human rights
revolution is deploying technologies?
What are they trying to document?
What are they seeing andwhat are the challenges
with what can be seen?
(26:33):
Because everything isn't seeable.
And often the legal question is a question
of immediate and approximate violence.
Who committed the crime?
Who shot the gun, who killed?
And how do we hold that personresponsible, when in fact,
one of the things that our research showed
was that what is beyond the scope
(26:54):
or the scopic regime, wecalled it the scopic regime,
this regime of knowledge.
And often we depend on whatwe can see within the scope
of what is visible,
but what is often invisible
are the longer term,
the longue durée of structural conditions
that actually set theconditions for violence
(27:15):
in the first place.
- So you mentioned thefarmer-herder crisis in Nigeria,
and I wonder,
that I think is a good example
that really illustratessome of your concerns
and what you're talking about.
Could you just sort of, Iknow it's a very, you know,
complicated crisis.
Could you just sort of brieflyoutline the current tensions
between the two groups in Nigeria
(27:37):
and then what is rendered absent
and invisible through these technologies
in that particular context?
- The farmer-herder crisis in Nigeria
is not unlike a lot of crises around land
in a lot of places in the world.
And in this case with herders,
you often have peoplewho tend to be nomadic,
(28:01):
who for hundreds of years,thousands of years, in fact,
their lineage has takentheir cattle along grazing
paths to the market, to sell,
to engage in trade.
And historically there were grazing paths.
So the land, the cattlecould eat along the paths.
(28:24):
Increasingly land laws
were put in place
that encroached on those grazing paths
and moving land from the people
and ownership of the peoplefor all to share to land owned
by the crown to landowned by the governor.
- The British crown.
- The British crown, beforeamalgamation in 1914,
(28:47):
- A quick refresher, inthe late 19th century,
as part of the expansion ofEuropean empires into Africa,
Britain established twocolonial territories.
The northern and southernNigerian Protectorates.
Initially kept separate,
they were merged toform one state in 1914.
(29:07):
With the merger came thecontinued subordination of people
with nomadic lifestyles
and a system of land tenurethat privileged farmers
and further displaced northern herders.
- And then by independence in 1960,
you have a whole set
of other jurisprudentialdecisions around land.
(29:28):
And increasingly what youhave is the increasing
privatization of land
and the decrease ingrazing paths for herders,
to the extent that farmers, who,
many of whom are actuallyvery impoverished people,
people who if they have abad crop in a given year,
(29:49):
they will starve, right?
There's no resources.
Their livelihood, the children,
everyone depend on the harvest.
And if animals, cows, etcetera,
trample on the very livelihoodthat is all they have,
then of course you havethe basis for strife.
And historically there were ways
that people negotiated those things.
(30:10):
Something called the Berti system
where there were relationshipsthat if something was
trampled, you pay for the loss.
And over time thosethings became constricted,
the ways that peoplerelated to each other.
The antagonisms grew
with the increasingly difficult
and offensive laws thateventually governors
(30:33):
came to manage.
And today what you have
is a volatile crisis in which thousands of
people are being killed aroundsome of these land-based...
that have only been accentuated
and made more difficult by land laws.
- And so the technology ishelping to, well, in one respect,
(30:56):
it's helping to providethe sort of imagery,
evidence of
what exactly?
- Yeah, it's called a EWER system.
So it's early warning, early response.
And one of the projects that I worked on
and around which over 300 communities
(31:18):
and people organized,
had to do
with the predictivecapacity of the technology.
So often during thatperiod, there were burnings.
So sometimes it was retaliatory.
So say the farmers, something happened,
they shot some of the cattle,
the herders would go back
and report back to their group,
(31:40):
and then that groupwould go back to the farm
and might retaliate.
And sometimes thatretaliation involved burning,
burning down of villages.
And then people would haveto run for cover, for safety.
And you had these cycles of violence,
often a lot of burning.
And so the geospatialtechnologies would trigger,
(32:00):
the algorithm actuallywould trigger burning.
So the way that it was written,
it could detect the burning,
and within 10 to 20 hours,
community members would get the alert
that there's a burning.
And at that point, thegoverning council would meet
what we call the EWER forum,
and they would determinewhat they should do.
So there's a burning, dowe flee, do we negotiate,
(32:22):
do we fight, do we protectourselves, do we stay put?
And those deliberationswould have to happen.
And that's the revolutionarypiece of that work
in many ways,
it's putting in place amechanism for thinking about
what the nature of that violence is
and what the appropriate response is.
(32:43):
Not just pick up a gun andfight and engage in retaliation,
but it's what are the resourcesthat are available to us
around which we can negotiate differently
or around which we could end this cycle
and put in place a newarrangement in this community.
And so people have been doing that work.
(33:04):
The problem with the emancipatory nature
of this kind of deliberation
is that on one hand,
the algorithm triggers fire and people act
and they make progressive decisions about
how they should proceed.
On the other hand,
the question is stillabout proximate violence.
Who did it?
(33:24):
What should we do?
How do we flee?
And oftentimes it's not about longer term
responses as well as thelongue durée in which
that violence is happening.
And many legal questionsaren't about that longue durée,
they're about proximate violence.
Who did it?
(33:44):
What do we do?
How do we proceed?
Because people are tryingto save their lives.
But our work is also...
we were interested indocumenting these kind
of progressive social mobilizations,
but also one of thethings that we saw is that
what gets missed is otherthings that are outside
of that scopic regime thataren't just about the law
(34:06):
and who did what and culpability,
they're about a whole set of other things
that have to do with histories of land law
and displacement and dispossession.
- The colonial history
that you were talking about earlier, yeah.
- Colonial and the post-colonial.
The colonial just transferred right
into the post-colonial after independence.
- Because you mentioned for the farmer,
(34:26):
it can be their livelihood that's gone.
If a cattle, you know, ruins a crop,
same thing I'm assuming
for a herder, if someoneshoots their cattle,
that's their livelihood as well.
- Absolutely, absolutely.
So it's both what's outside of the scope,
why is it that we havethat structural condition
in the first place,
and how did laws enable that?
And how do we rectify thatfrom land dispossession
(34:49):
to a different compensation, you know,
a different way
of redistributing land thathas not yet been rectified
in the post-colonial state.
- Going forward, how would you like
to see this technology used in a way
that could maybe betteracknowledge the history
of this structural violence
and some of the root causes of conflict?
(35:10):
Is there a way it could be paired
with other kinds of evidence?
- Yeah, it's a question thatI've thought about a lot,
and that gives me,
sometimes when I thinkthrough those questions,
I think, oh, I need a million dollars.
Because the ideal is to bring together,
it's the collaborative work.
(35:32):
It's to bring togethercomputer programmers,
it's to bring together geographers,
it's to bring together historians,
it's to bring together analysts.
It's to bring together architects
in a room to design
progressive analytic software
(35:52):
and tools that actually can allow us
to think complexly about the nature
of violence in our world.
And we see some models for this.
SSRC has an interestingproject called Just Tech,
which tries to fund the wholeperson to bring together teams
of people to work on key projects.
(36:13):
And every year, I think,they fund about six projects
that are collaborative.
And we desperately needmodels for thinking.
I mean, a computer programmerwho is just looking for fire,
is going to actually missso many other things.
If you're just looking for fire
and you equip village peopleto respond to the fire,
(36:34):
how do you then make senseof people who have hundreds
of years of dispossessionon the other hand?
So you equip some people with the tools
and the laptops and the technologies,
and then others who may be contributing,
to the problem may be responding to it,
and are themselves victims of it,
(36:56):
don't have those tools necessarily.
How do we then think about those longer,
the longue durée ofviolence in the region?
And so I think part of what we need
is responsible tech that can allow us
to ask more than thequestion, who is culpable?
Looking for a singleperpetrator of violence.
It's not just, violence isnot just about the individual
(37:17):
person that carries out the act,
it's about the deeper questions,about those conditions,
those longer conditions inwhich those things came to be
that way some 90 years later.
(soft music)
- Kamari Maxine Clarke isthe distinguished professor
(37:40):
of Transnational Justice
and Sociolegal Studies atthe University of Toronto
at the Centre for Criminologyand Sociolegal Studies,
and the Centre for Diasporaand Transnational Studies.
She's also a former JHIFaculty Research Fellow.
(38:02):
And that wraps up the very first season
of Humanities At Large,
a podcast from the JackmanHumanities Institute
at the University of Toronto.
Special thanks to AlisonKeith, Kimberley Yates,
Sonja Johnston, MonicaToffoli, Cheryl Pasternak,
and Katy Swailes.
If you enjoyed this episode,
(38:22):
be sure to share it witha friend or colleague.
And if you missed any ofmy previous conversations
with JHI researchersinvestigating questions
around the theme of absence,
all six episodes are available now.
Don't forget to leaveus a five star review.
I'm Melissa Gismondi.
Thanks for listening.
(38:44):
(soft music)
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!