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Jessica Auchter is a full professor and research chair in visual culture in international studies at Université Laval in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. She explores the management of dead bodies after mass violence and how institutions grapple with this challenge. 

In this episode we talk about:

• Auchter’s research on memory, memorialization, and the representation of violence, leading her to concentrate on the materiality of dead bodies and the politics surrounding their management after events like genocide.





• The contrast between institutional approaches to reconciliation, which often focus on political and legal processes, and the immediate, material reality of dealing with dead bodies and the loss experienced by affected communities.





• How Western societies tend to manage death by moving it out of the public sphere, which is often seen as a marker of civilization, unlike other cultures where death may be more integrated into public life. This can lead to a perception that death in certain parts of the world is normalized, thus justifying international intervention in managing the dead.





• The concept of bodily integrity and how the perception of body parts differs from that of a “whole” body.





• How the dismemberment of bodies is a human rights violation and a tactic used to dehumanize enemies, disrupt truth-telling, and demoralize communities.





• That scientific authority is becoming more technologically advanced in managing the aftermath of mass conflicts.





• Necropolitics, highlighting that some bodies and body parts are valued more than others.

Find more about Jessica Auchter through her websites:

• https://www.esei.ulaval.ca/en/our-school/directory/jessica-auchter





•  https://www.culturevisuelle-ei.chaire.ulaval.ca/en

and the following:

• Global Corpse Politics: The Obscenity Taboo (Cambridge, 2021)





•  Transformations and Transitions: The Social and Political Life of the Dead (with Lia Kent and Caroline Bennett), Death Studies (2024)





• Demystifying Trauma in International Relations Theory (with Henrique Tavares Furtado), Security Dialogue (2024)





• Missing Pieces and Body Parts: On Bodily Integrity and Political Violence, Death Studies (2024)

Notes from the start

Clea Koff’s 2004 book The Bone Woman: Among the Dead in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.

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Transcript

Yvonne Kjorlien: All right, thank you very much for responding to my email, number one. And talking about dead people is always a conversation-ender. And here we’re actually going to have a conversation about dead people. Yay. So, Jessica, please introduce yourself and tell us where you are and what you do.

Jessica Auchter: Thank you so much. So I’m Jessica Auchter. I’m a full professor and research chair in visual culture in international studies at Universite Laval in Quebec City, Canada. so before that I worked at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga for 10 years before moving up to Quebec. So my background is mostly in international studies. My degree is in global politics. But for a long time, I’ve been working with issues of memory, memorialization and its representation and the larger kind of dynamics of the politics of violence and how we think about the aftermath of violence, its effects and those sorts of dynamics. So, I have a wide-ranging interest in those kinds of issues that ultimately led me to this focus on dead bodies, which as you said, is often more of a conversation ender than a conversation starter. So, I’m really excited to get the chance to talk about it at length today.

Yvonne Kjorlien: That is quite a change. I mean, not just from Tennessee to Quebec, but also from what you were studying to now. How are you dealing with, I mean, I guess both culture shifts?

Jessica Auchter: Yeah, it’s interesting. So, the move up here was sort of a natural move because I’ve been working for a long time in the dynamics of kind of visual representation. And so, when the position opened up where I am now for an opportunity to work directly with the kind of dynamics of visual representations of violence and human rights violations, it was kind of a no-brainer to make the move.

But I think for a long time I’ve been interested in the dynamics of violence. Originally it started with an interest in genocide and the aftermath of genocide and the larger politics of memory. But I think over time what I started to realize is that many people who were interested in these kinds of issues were focused a lot on the institutional dynamics of reconciliation after atrocity, after genocide. So it was a lot about peace processes, political reconciliation, institutional mechanisms of justice, but that in many of these instances you were dealing with a very material aftermath of dead bodies. So after genocide, yes, you do have all these issues of political reconciliation and institutional dynamics and rebuilding of state structures and governments, but you also have a lot of dead bodies that are sort of scattered around on the ground. And there is the kind of problem of: How do you deal with them? How do you bury them according to local traditions? How are these understandings contested? What are the involvement of international actors in the kind of dynamics of the materiality of dead bodies after atrocity?

And it started with the genocide context but kind of broadened over time. But also how do you reckon with some of the dilemmas associated with these dead bodies who are often articulated in the context of truth narratives. So I think it started with an interest in violence and its aftermath. But I started to realize that for a lot of people, their immediate experience of political violence had a lot more to do with the materiality of dead bodies or the loss of loved ones and some of these narratives than the kind of attention that academics were paying to these kind of larger scale political and social reconciliation processes.

So that’s where it began is with this interest in kind of bottom up, I’ll say, dynamics of the materiality of dead bodies and just the reality that this is often a management problem. You just have a lot of dead bodies. Sometimes they’re in mass graves, sometimes we don’t know what happened to them, sometimes they’re disappeared. And so at the beginning it was a lot about the way this was framed as a management problem and also the connection between dead bodies and their integration into memorial sites, like memorial museums and that sort of thing. 

And then over time I started to think a lot more about how the reality of modern conflict, warfare, human rights violations was that we don’t see the kind of whole body in the way that is often kind of idealized. You’re not just excavating a mass grave and uncovering an entire person, identifying that person, returning them to their loved ones. That isn’t really– and then being able to kind of describe a narrative of what happened to them. That’s not really how it works. You have suicide bombings where body parts are integrated in urban sort of spaces. You have terrorist attacks like September 11th where you have bodies and body parts being combined with rubble. And then you also have governments that are deliberately trying to disaggregate bodies in order to hide what happened to them, especially in the context when governments are perpetrators of human rights violations. So I think over time my interest in dead bodies also led me more recently to