The South African Research Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma.

The Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ) is established to fulfill the goals of the South African Research Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. It aims to bring conceptual clarity to the concept of violence and its consequences in the lives of victim and survivor groups on the one hand, and perpetrators and their descendants on the other. As an interdisciplinary project, we will take an intersectional approach and engage with the physical and structural aspects of violence, as well as the more insidious and symbolic forms of its expression that manifest in dynamic ways. We aim to put the issue of healing in the aftermath of violent histories in the centre of our inquiry and to explore and examine various strategies that have been employed to “heal the past.” To this end, we will create opportunities for engagement with violent histories from different contexts through seminars, social dialogue, and arts practice and explore different reparative practices and what it means to “repair” the past. An important objective of the Centre is to set an agenda for exploring new intellectual frontiers and new ways of understanding transgenerational trauma and strategies of redress and healing from the violence. This is an integral part of our doctoral programme, which draws from the supervisory talent of an interdisciplinary pool of academic staff drawn from across the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

MISSION

Shaping research on new knowledge production in the study of violence and its reproduction transgenerationally in order to advance new intellectual frontiers within not only the academy, but also having some impact on public debate and influencing audiences at the broader level of civil society.

VISION

A centre that will become a hub of critical debates on violence, its trans-generational repercussions and strategies to repair the past.