In the wake of unthinkable atrocities, it is reasonable to ask how any population can move on from the experience of genocide. Simply remembering the past can, in the shadow of mass death, be re-traumatising. So how can such momentous events be memorialised in a way that is productive and even healing for survivors? Nicole Fox’s 2021 book After Genocide: Memory and Reconciliation in Rwanda (University of Wisconsin Press) investigates such questions through extensive interviews with survivors decades after mass violence has ended. After Genocide reveals the relationship survivors have to memorial spaces and uncovers those voices silenced by the dominant narrative—arguing that the erasure of such stories is an act of violence itself.

Nicole Fox, Ph.D., research centres on how racial and ethnic contention impacts communities, including how remembrances of adversity shape social change, collective memory and present-day social movements.  She is a professor of criminal justice at California State University Sacramento where she teaches about atrocity crimes, mass incarceration, global criminology and law. Her 2021 book, After Genocide: Memory and Reconciliation in Genocide, focuses on how memorials to past atrocity shape healing, community development and reconciliation for survivors of genocide and genocidal rape. Her most recent project examines bystander intervention, with an emphasis on individuals who conducted acts of rescue during times of social unrest and political violence.  Her scholarship has been published in Social Problems, Signs, Social Forces, Deviant Behavior, the Journal for Scientific Study of Religion, Sociological Forum, Societies without borders, among others. Her work has generously been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Grant, the National Science Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, University of New Hampshire’s Prevention Innovation Research Center, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Society for the Study of Social Problems and the American Sociological Society’s Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline and others. She also serves on the United Nations Economic and Social Council and contributes to the UN Commission for the Status of Women held annually at the UN headquarters.

Booking essential to dowi@jhbholocaust.co.za