Jeanne Rachel Lieberman

My project examines the dynamics of collaboration and contestation between state institutions and social movements through which the boundaries of what counts as historical truth relevant to Colombia’s transitional justice process is defined and the hierarchy of knowledge practices informing governance is renegotiated. My research asks, how are the boundaries around what counts as evidence enacted and contested in institutional processes of justice-making? What other categories and knowledge practices are mobilized to establish veracity in grassroots peacebuilding processes? How do social movements and government officials mobilize the unique sensory and affective properties of audiovisual media to shape the regimes of truth that regulate how claims about the past are evaluated? To answer these questions, I will conduct ethnography attending to narrative practices and politics in three setting where state institutions and social movement participants interface in the process of producing historical memory in the Cauca region of Colombia: 1. The production and dissemination of the Truth Commission’s report; 2. A regional court case moving through the transitional justice legal apparatus; 3. Grassroots media production. To analyze my findings, I will bring media anthropology into dialogue with anthropological approaches to studying expertise emerging out of anthropology of the state and STS.