Speakers:

Dr Olivera Simic (Griffith University Law School, Queensland, Australia), ‘Silenced Victims of Wartime Sexual Violence in Bosnia’.

Dr Ivor Sokolić (LSE), ‘Skirts as Flags: Transitional Justice, Gender and Everyday Nationalism in Kosovo’.

Dr Rachel Kerr (King’s College London), ‘Fabricating Reconciliation:  Empty dresses and missing women in Canada’.

Chair: Dr Jelke Boesten (King’s College London)

Olivera Simic will discuss her new book, Silenced Victims of Wartime Sexual Violence (Routledge, 2018) in which she explores the silence surrounding certain women’s experiences of wartime sexual violence within academic, legal and public discourses. The book focuses on the experiences of Bosnian Serb women, where two decades after the war, women in Bosnia and Herzegovina are still facing the legacies of the violence in the 1990s. While all women survivors of rape face problems of stigma, shame and lack of political visibility, the lived experience of these women demonstrates that there is a victim hierarchy at play. Ivor Sokolic will discuss a jointly authored study (with Denisa Kostovicova and Vjollca Krasniqi) of an artistic installation of 5,000 women’s skirts and dresses at a football stadium in Kosovo which sought to highlight the issue of wartime rape and give voice to victims. Rachel Kerr will discuss another instance of the use of feminine symbols (dresses) to highlight the issue of the large numbers of missing indigenous women together with practices associated with the domestic realm of women (quilting) in and around the Truth and Reconciliation process in Canada.

This event is part of an AHRC-funded project, Art and Reconciliation: Conflict, Culture and Community.  More info at: https://artreconciliation.org/