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Tunisia's Forgotten Voices: Youth Activism, Art & Resilience

Arnaud Kurze maps the creation of alternative transitional justice spaces in post-conflict contexts.

Info about event

Time

Wednesday 12 December 2018,  at 15:15 - 17:00

Location

1451-518

Organizer

ICSRU

Drawing on post-authoritarian Tunisia, Dr. Arnaud Kurze scrutinizes the work of contemporary youth activists and artists to to address human rights abuses, deal with the past and foster sociopolitical change. He notably focuses on the intersection between repression, contentious politics and the concept of resilience. His research draws on in-depth interviews with Tunisian youth activist leaders focusing on their performance-based campaigns. His work builds on Foucault’s concept of heterotopia – spaces of otherness that are simultaneously physical and mental – to fuel new insights on the challenges associated with generating spaces of memory and accountability. In is findings, Dr. Kurze demonstrates that the emergence of this new fragile spatiality is nevertheless contingent on contested visions and memories of Tunisia’s secularist and Islamist political traditions.

Arnaud Kurze is Assistant Professor of Justice Studies at Montclair State University. His scholarly work on transitional justice in the post-Arab Spring world focuses particularly on youth activism, art and collective memory. From 2016-2018, Dr. Kurze was appointed a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, studying youth resilience in North Africa and the Middle East. Since 2013 he has also been a Visiting Scholar at New York University. He has published widely in academic journals, contributed to edited volumes and is author of several reports on foreign affairs for the US government and international organizations. He regularly writes analyses and op-ed articles online for think tanks and other institutions. He has also given interviews on LGBT issues in the Middle East and Tunisia’s democratization process, among others. He is the co-editor of New Critical Spaces in Transitional Justice: Gender, Art & Memory published by Indiana University Press.