Mairead Smith

ABSTRACT SUBMITTED: Mairéad Smith, then a graduate student at Brown University, was awarded funding in October 2024 to aid research on Translating Rape: Humanitarian Encounters, Language Ideologies, and Violence’s Afterlives. This project examines how legal, bureaucratic, and narrative practices constitutive of the humanitarian response to wartime sexual violence shape the conditions under which violence becomes recognizable, speakable, and reparable in the context of Iraq. It traces how globally circulating language ideologies in humanitarian responses to wartime sexual violence—those that encourage women to “speak out,” “break the silence,” and dispel the “shame” of rape—intersect with local language ideologies that claim that Kurmancî–the language spoken by the majority of victims–does not have a direct translation for “rape.” This project examines how humanitarian interventions centered on universalizing the category of rape and recovering a lost voice seek to remake social life after mass violence by producing the survivor as a particular form of speaking subject. By analyzing how survivors are socialized to narrate violence in ways that are intelligible within humanitarian, legal, and reparative frameworks, this research reveals how speech becomes tied to recognition, justice, and access to reparations, ultimately showing how language is central to how life is remade in the aftermath of rape.