Professor Reading will speak on storytelling as restitution

The Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice at Queen’s University Belfast, is hosting a Public Lecture: “Begin Again: Telling Stories as Restitution” given by Professor Anna Reading, Head of the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London.

Professor Reading writes:

Restitution is usually defined primarily in terms of money or the return of property. But this talk contends that without story-telling restitution after conflict or atrocity is impossible.  How might stories help with post-conflict restitution? This talk explores how restitution is not a one-off event or economic contract but continually requires individuals and communities to begin again in multiple ways at different points in time. This is because the restoration of that lost or stolen through violence, conflict and atrocity is an ongoing daily struggle that requires communities to retell stories of human agency, trust and connection. The talk draws on the stories I have sought to tell as a playwright, as well as academic research on the role of institutions in telling stories of trauma and atrocity, including those working to record and preserve digital stories.  I explore how restitution needs to be understood not in terms of singular moments or acts, but also in terms of different kinds of stories that form memory assemblages as part of the complex labour of restitution.  Restitution of the memory and trauma of conflict and atrocity remains impossible while there is no recognition of the different mediated economies of memory and daily and generational labours of trauma involved its recovery. In recognizing this we begin to see restitution and memory acts as those which make the burden of loss not restored but tolerable. Restitutional labour then may involve the payment of money, the building of monuments, and state apology as well as cultural acts and the telling of stories. In this way the restitutional assemblage works across various times and temporalities, through different felt registers and in different locales and domains.

The event will take place at 3pm on Thursday 15 May 2014 in the Upstairs Theatre at the Metropolitan Arts Centre (MAC), Belfast.

For tickets, please contact the MAC Box Office www.themaclive.com.
For further information, please contact Dr Stefanie Lehner: s.lehner@qub.ac.uk

This event is organised by the Interdisciplinary Research Group ‘Art, Performance and Media in (Post-) Conflict Societies’, hosted and funded by the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice at Queen’s University Belfast in collaboration with the MAC.