In an era where truth itself faces radical contestation, how can we uphold archival integrity and calls for accountability while fostering morally coherent, victim-centred forms of ethical witnessing?

This event introduces Minoli Salgado’s recent monograph, Witness Literature: Culture, Memory and Contested Truths (Bloomsbury, 2025), engages with the creative practice of bearing witness and explores the role of testimonial work in a range of critically-neglected sites from the Global South that include Cambodia, Rwanda, South Africa and Sri Lanka.

Spanning memoir, survivor testimony, life writing, autobiography, poetry and fiction, witness literature emerges as a vital global archive that engages with and preserves politically contested or marginalised events. Yet it confronts formidable aesthetic, ethical, and political challenges for those—academics, human rights practitioners, journalists, and writers—who gather and record narratives of trauma.

This event is part of the 2026 Arts+Conflict series by the Art&Conflict Hub at King's War Studies Department.

Chair: Pablo De Orellana

Panellists

• Minoli Salgado (Professor of International Writing, Manchester Metropolitan University)
• Rachel Kerr (Professor of War and Society, King's College London)
• Zoe Norridge (Reader in African and Comparative Literature and Visual Cultures, King's College London).