Finding Pathways Towards Repair After Atrocity
Encounters Between the Body, the Spectral and the Forensic
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20109090 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Robyn Gill-Leslie (0000-0002-7501-6328, Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law University of Oslo Oslo Norway, corresponding author), Mareile Kaufmann (0000-0002-7982-3418, Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law University of Oslo Oslo Norway), Athandiwe Saba (Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law University of Oslo Oslo Norway), Nobuntu Bongeka Gumede (Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law University of Oslo Oslo Norway) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-05-20 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Social Science Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-8701 • E-ISSN: 1468-2451 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/issj.70052 |
| OpenAlex | W7161999644 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 34 |
Centuries of colonial and apartheid rule have left South Africa with a landscape of violent histories and hundreds of missing and dead. This article extends current research framed inside critical forensics, arguing that encounters between the spectral, the body and the forensic generate productive, layered meaning‐making—as distinct from knowledge production—in the search for repair inside landscapes of historical and ongoing violence. What offers healing in these complex landscapes with deep cosmological roots is not only a scientific approach aimed at forensic bodily identification, leading to presumed justice and closure. In South Africa, where visions, spirits and visits to the ancestral plane are social facts, the spectral offers pathways towards addressing harm that upset linear chronologies and mapped sites for forensic exhumations of the missing. Our empirical research from the KwaZulu‐Natal province is a careful interpretation of how sangomas—through a variety of sensorial experiences and affective registers—are part of a social ecology that navigates pathways towards repair inside landscapes of violence
Colonialism · Criminal justice · Economic Justice · Harm · Interpretation (philosophy) · Social justice · Variety (cybernetics) · Forensic and Genetic Research · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · South African History and Culture
Voicing the aftermath
Anthropology as a Humanitarian Action in Peru
The Strengths and Limitations of South Africa's Search for Apartheid-Era Missing Persons
Re-thinking memory and transitional justice
Epistemologies of Domination
The Environmental History of Mass Graves
Eastern Cape Bloodlines I
Sex, gender and Uvalo/Letswalo centred spirituality
Remotely Sensing Affective Afterlives
Spectral ecologies
Spirits, Land, and Bones
Towards a spectral forensics
Spirits and social reconstruction after mass violence
Nicholas Gcaleka and the Search for Hintsa's Skull
Deep Forensics for a More-than-Human Justice
A social ecology∗
The problem of epistemological critique in contemporary Decolonial theory
Silent Stock
Situating the Investigation on Clandestine Graves in Mexico
Spirit map and medium's message
Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge
Toward a Critical Hauntology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |