Speaker | Prof. Claudia Mitchell
When | Wednesday 18th June, 17:30-19:00 BST
Where | Online (via Zoom)
NB - This event is part of the York Refugee Week programme; for more details, please visit here.
Content note: This event deals with war and war-affected children and youth; refugee crises; graphic representations of violence, death and trauma; gender-based violence.
For this Visual Ethics Network online talk and workshop, Prof. Claudia Mitchell will discuss the ethical challenges of disseminating participatory research. More specifically, it will focus on ethical challenges as part of curatorial conversations in working with the artwork of refugee children and war-affected youth. Although this discussion can be informed by key bodies of work on ‘difficult’ images–especially photographs of war and atrocities, typically produced by journalists and NGOs working in humanitarian settings– it will bring into the fore the added complexities in relation to the age of the artists, genres, participatory process of creating and audiences. The conversations range from reflexive dialogue over ‘seen and heard’ vs ‘unseen and unheard’, to creating pedagogical and generative spaces for viewing and accountability. The material presented in the webinar will draw on a range of art-making projects from over two decades, including the “For Us and by Us": Children's Picture Books to Promote Solidarity and Acceptance in the Age of Refugees(2018-2021) in Coventry and Halifax, and experiences of gathering and exhibiting in Canadian contexts the drawings of war and conflict affected children from Mali, Rwanda. Kenya and South Africa.
After the talk, there will be a discussion between the speaker and Dr Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani, art historian and theorist, followed by a Q & A. For the last part of this event, we will have a participatory workshop, in which we will engage with a set of key questions that could emerge from the examined visual material and the ethical implications of how, where, and when one presents them in a public setting.
This event is organised by the Visual Ethics Network (CModS Research Strand) and funded by the Centre for Modern Studies, University of York.
Sign up | The event is free, but booking is required. Please sign up here.
Bio | Claudia Mitchell is a Distinguished James McGill Professor from McGill University, Canada and an Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. She is currently directing a large transnational project, ‘Transform: Engaging with Young People for Social Change’. She has written extensively about participatory visual research with children and young people. Some of the book titles include her recent co-edited volume Global Child: Children and Families Affected by War, Displacement , and Migration, Disrupting Shameful Legacies: Girls and Young Women Speak Back The Arts to Address Sexual Violence; and several volumes on rurality: Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods, Our Rural Selves: Memory, Place and the Visual in Canadian Rural Childhoods, and Where am I in the Picture? Positionality in Rural Studies. She is a member of the Royal Society of Canada.