Joel M Modiri the acting Deputy Dean: Teaching and Learning and Head of the Department of Jurisprudence in the Faculty of Law, University of Pretoria. He holds the degrees LLB cum laude (Pret) and PhD (Pret). His PhD thesis was entitled “The Jurisprudence of Steve Biko: A Study in Race, Law and Power in the ‘Afterlife’ of Colonial-apartheid”. His research and teaching interests are located in the broad field of jurisprudence and relate to critical race theory, Black political thought and African philosophy. His current projects intersect under two umbrellas rooted in the ethics and politics of the global Black radical tradition: Azanian critical theory and constitutional abolitionism. He was recently appointed as a United Nations Independent Eminent Expert in the area of race and racial discrimination.

Professor Tamar Garb is Durning Lawrence Professor in History of Art, University College London. She has published widely on questions of gender, sexuality, the woman artist and the body. Her recent work addresses post-apartheid culture and art as well as the history of photographic practices in Africa. Key publications include Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in fin de sieÌcle France, (1996), The Painted Face, Portraits of Women in France 1814 -1914 (2007). The Body in Time: Figures of Femininity in Late Nineteenth- Century France; The Painted Face, Portraits of Women in France 1814– 1914 (Yale University Press, 2007); and Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth Century Paris (Yale University Press, 1994). Selected exhibitions she has curated include: “Land Marks/Home Lands: Contemporary Art from South Africa” at Haunch of Venison, London in 2008; “Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography” at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London in 2011; “Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive” at the Walther Collection, New York, Ulm and Berlin, 2014–2015; and “Made Routes: Vivienne Koorland and Berni Searle” at the Richard Saltoun Gallery, London in 2019.

Professor Homi K. Bhabha is Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Harvard University. He was founding director of Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Centre and director of the Harvard Humanities Centre. He has received numerous awards and distinguished honorary professorships, including Extraordinary Professor affiliated with AVReQ, as reported in the Harvard Crimson here. Professor Bhabha is the author of numerous works exploring postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, contemporary art, and cosmopolitanism. His book Location of Culture has recently been reprinted as a Routledge Classic and has been translated into seven languages. He has written an introduction to a new translation of Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth.

What does it mean to bear witness in a time of relentless violence? When images of cruelty dominate our screens and when acts of public witnessing seem to deepen hostility rather than foster compassion, what remains of the ethical power of witnessing?

Historically, the atrocity of the Holocaust deepened our understanding of the moral imperative to bear witness. This recognition, exemplified through memoirs, films, news reports, and photography, highlighted the importance of testifying to the horrors of genocide and other mass atrocities. In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, despite its limitations, sought to create a space for survivors and victims’ families to bear witness to their suffering, offering a path towards the possibility of repair. Yet in the face of contemporary global crises, the act of witnessing often feels fraught with ambiguity. Atrocities unfold on our television screens in real time, with images and narratives of violence dominating our media.

This conference seeks to explore the ethical, emotional, and political dimensions of bearing witness to suffering both near and distant. What does sustained exposure to the pain of others evoke in us? Does it call forth our empathy and a sense of moral urgency, or does it risk numbing us and engendering detachment, or even an uneasy sense of complicity? Does witnessing itself carry ethical weight, leading to a form of psychic vulnerability?

At the same time, bearing witness testimony is not always received with openness; it can be met with scepticism, weaponised for political ends, or dismissed altogether. How, then, might we cultivate practices of witnessing that resist indifference, and ensure instead that they open the possibility of acts of care, solidarity, and ethical engagement with those who suffer? What role can art, literature, and other forms of creative expression play in bearing witness to atrocity and contribute to cultivating practices of repair?