Stories from Rwanda: Academic, Creative, Applied

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How do you see Rwanda? In the aftermath of the genocide that shook the world, how do you picture this small East African country? And who has shaped these images? Who are the photographers, storytellers, reporters, editors and filmmakers who have influenced your imagination? My research examines how Rwanda has been 'curated' for international audiences - the visual and verbal stories told about genocide and its aftermath and the ways in which they have been disseminated globally.In 1994 between 800,000 and a million people were killed in Rwanda in just one hundred days. Many of these killings took place in people's homes or nearby public spaces. After genocide survivors often returned to where they lived before, to the sites where they lost hundreds of friends and family members. These killings and the process of rebuilding life after genocide, are grounded in an intimate knowledge of a particular place. However, during genocide and its aftermath many Rwandans were displaced. And the first international stories about Rwanda were told by foreigners mostly travelling to the country for the first time. Familiarity with place then, in Rwanda, is intimately tied to the question of authorship. Survivors giving testimony about genocide recollect sites of killings, the places where people hid, routes out of the country. Accounts by influential visiting journalists and novelists by contrast dwell on the strangeness of the landscape and disorientation. To understand experiences of genocide we need to listen to local people who lived through the events and are still grappling with their consequences. But to understand how Rwanda has been perceived internationally we must also pay attention to the narratives of outsiders. This fellowship begins with two writing projects that study and contest these dynamics. My monograph Rwanda: The Testimony of Place, examines how the field of testimony has been shaped and is changing the further we move from 1994. My translation of Yolande Mukagasana's testimony La mort ne veut pas de moi will bring a key Rwandan voice to English-speaking audiences for the first time. I then develop these themes of place and authorship building on my existing networks established while making the BBC documentary Living with Memory in Rwanda and curating the AHRC-funded exhibition Rwanda in Photographs (2014). Exploring my Rwandan colleagues' observation that Rwandans have little control over narratives circulating about them internationally, I will map ways in which stories about Rwanda are consistently mediated by outsiders from the Global North, and challenge these dynamics through interventions designed to foreground Rwandan voices. In 2018 I will convene a workshop facilitated by photographer-activist Marcelo Brodsky (Argentina) and writer-editor Billy Kahora (Kenya), bringing together Rwandan photographers and writers with NGOs based in Rwanda. The workshop aims to demonstrate that NGOs can benefit from working with local artists as opposed to flying in foreign journalists for their communication campaigns, and offers valuable training and networking for participants. Slideshows in Kigali and London will share the results and selected work will be published in a journal special issue.Accompanying the workshop are three further interventions: A policy briefing for photo editors outlining the business and ethical case for commissioning photography locally rather than internationally; A quantitative study co-authored with social psychologist Dr Keon West showing why this is important for humanising the people depicted; And a visually-rich website drawing together my own research and images generated over the past five years of engagement activities.This fellowship will establish me as an emerging leader in post-conflict cultures, providing time to complete two key publications and funding to forge new ways forward through projects that combine both academic research and cultural activism.