The South African Research Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma and the transgenerational repercussions of violent histories. The SARChI Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma is a multidisciplinary research initiative that aims to bring conceptual clarity to the genealogies of violence and to illuminate the enduring legacies of violent histories and their transgenerational repercussions. At the heart of the work that the Chair is concerned with is what has been referred to as the “afterlife" of historical trauma – the continuing transgenerational impact of violent pasts shaped by colonisation, oppression, discrimination, and destruction of communities. As a multidisciplinary research initiative, the Chair seeks to explore new avenues of inquiry in research and knowledge production in the study of violence and its transgenerational reproduction within not only the academy, but also having some impact on public debate and influencing audiences at the broader level of civil society.
What is unique about the work of the Chair is that its focus is not only on the transgenerational impact of violent histories on descendants of victims and survivors. The research programme also aims to investigate the afterlife of violence and its complex legacies among descendants of perpetrators and groups implicated in the oppressive and violent pasts. An important objective of the work of the Chair is setting an agenda for a comparative examination of strategies of redress and restorative and reparative practices aimed at interrupting the transgenerational repercussions of violence.
The Chair's research programme is inspired by calls for the “decolonisation" of the curriculum. In this regard, among the activities of the Chair is the development of a postgraduate research education programme to train a diverse but mostly black (ACI) group of young researchers and postgraduate students. This will be implemented as a programme of the Centre created within the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ). The Centre has been established to enable the Chair to become an autonomous university entity within which to advance the training of postgraduate students. Through this centre, the goal is to establish the SARChI as a focal point on the African continent with global impact for study and debates on violent histories (such as racism, genocide, colonialism, oppression), its haunting legacies, and strategies to repair the past.
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Contact:
Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
