Thursday, February 2
Lecture -- Archiving the Unspeakable: How Cambodians Use Khmer Rouge Photographs to Bear Witness to Genocide
Presenter: Michelle Caswell, University of Wisconsin
Time: 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
Location: 403 Information Sciences Building
Announced by: School of Information Sciences
Contact Email: sbindas@pitt.edu
Event Web Site: http://www.ischool.pitt.edu
In the Khmer Rouge’s brief but devastating rule, approximately two million Cambodians died. The regime kept meticulous records, including registration photographs of the 20,000 prisoners tortured at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison. This presentation traces the social life of these mug shots, from their historical roots in French colonial police photography and their discursive power to transform suspects into enemies of the state, to international and local efforts to preserve, display and digitize them, and their ongoing use by survivors and victims’ families to spark narratives about the dead in legal testimonies, memoirs, and documentary films. Additionally, these mug shots have been incorporated into new photographs that document the act of looking at them, adding a layer of meaning and context to the ever-expanding archives of the Cambodian genocide and revealing the strategic deployment of records for human rights activism against a political climate that encourages forgetting.
The University of Pittsburgh Department of History and the Humanities Center presents:
Maritime Orientalism, or, The Political Theory of Water
Speaker: Jonathan Scott Hall, University of Auckland
Wednesday, February 8th, 3:00 p.m.
History Department Lounge, 3703 Posvar
Rightly Stated? Contemporary and Historical Considerations of the State in Eastern and Eurasia
9th Annual REES and GOSECA Graduate Student Conference
February 24 - 26
4130 Posvar
Keynote speech by Dr. Eugene Huskey, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Political Science and Director of Russian Studies at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida. For more information: goseca.pitt.edu.