Rosie Hancock  0:08 
Hi, I'm Rosie Hancock in Sydney, Australia.

Alexis Hieu Truong  0:11  
And I'm Alexis Hieu Truong in Gatineau/Ottawa, Canada. And welcome back to Uncommon Sense from the SociologicalReview Foundation. Each month we take a theme that we've spotted out there in everyday use, way beyond academia. This series we've looked at things like, say, burnout, coffee culture and making, and we bring in an expert guest to help us see that notion differently, more critically and ultimately more sociologically, with our firm conviction that you don't – like – have to be a sociologist, to think like one.

Rosie Hancock  0:42 
The title of our show today is Life Admin, and we're giving it a double meaning. It's a term that's crept into the mainstream to refer to the endless and overwhelming paperwork that surrounds contemporary life. I guess it's very much a first world problem, arguably, possibly a millennial one as well. But today, we're actually going to be talking to someone whose work and knowledge gives that term a new meaning and a new gravity, because we're talking about the hard, crucial and altogether more serious paperwork of documenting human rights abuses. It's a conversation that might lead us to questions like, how does everyday experience get turned into actual knowledge? How does concern over the future use of data shape how we create it right now in the present? And why do we underestimate the nature and power of archives, at our peril?

Alexis Hieu Truong  1:32 
And to guide us today, our guest is Oriana Bernasconi, a sociologist based at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Chile, and she's interested in how massive episodes of political violence are resisted through the documentation of atrocities, and how societies confront those episodes and their legacies.

Rosie Hancock  1:52 
Oriana, welcome to Uncommon Sense.

Oriana Bernasconi  1:54 
Hi. Thank you for having me.

Rosie Hancock  1:57 
Now, I want to know are you good at dealing with paperwork and life admin in your everyday life?

Oriana Bernasconi  2:05 
Yeah, not very much. I don't, yeah, probably as many people we, I don't take – you know – it's not part of my main concerns to do paperwork. But I do keep some things from my family, from my children, such as, you know, photographs, or, you know, draws that they do, drawings when they were kids. Yeah, I think that goes back to my mother's way of, you know, archiving some things from the three of us in my family of origin. So, yeah, some. I do some paperwork, but very selectively.

Alexis Hieu Truong  2:46 
So, Oriana, can you tell us, like, how did the things that we described in our intro – so, human rights, archives, practices of documentation – how did they become your area of research? Was there a particular experience that kind of led you there?

Oriana Bernasconi  3:01 
Yeah, there was one. I was working another topic, but I had certain training from my, many years ago, from my PhD actually, on narrative research and life stories. One of the memory sites that was recovered was a clandestine detention, torture and place of execution of people during the dictatorship in Chile, was recovered and turned into a place of memory. And in Latin America, these places usually have a archive of testimonies of those that survived these places with their life stories. So they, this place is called Villa Grimaldi, is the first centre – like memory site – recovered in Latin America, from this era of dictatorships. And they asked me to listen to testimonies to and sort of give them some feedback on the way they were, you know, recording these testimonies. And so we had this meeting, and we we spent a day together with the team – you know – the interviewer, the psychologist, the whole team. In order to comment on their work, they send me, this were audio visual records of these testimonies. So they gave me samples of them, of them, and also the forms they use with the interview guide and the informed consent. So all that is, you know, the documents, the paperwork that is behind the actual interviews, our method in social sciences. And when I compare the interview guide with the actual testimony, I noticed how in the way we conduct interviews, we can try to shape the story, and that's the way I started to build up this idea of technologies of memory out of, you know, the, all the artifacts and the objects we used to collect information in general but, you know, in this case in particular.

Rosie Hancock  5:15 
Oriana, you know, much of your work centres around the case study of Chile. And before we go any further, could you just, you know, give us a little bit of extra detail here? You know, what happened in the country in the 1970s and onwards? Who was Pinochet? The context for, sort of the mass atrocities and violations that we're going to refer to today?

Oriana Bernasconi  5:37 
Yes, of course. Well, this is the context of the Cold War, so inspired by what they call the National Security Doctrine, Latin American armed forces led a number of dictatorships and what they call dirty wars to confront this menace of communism to spread across the continent. We had a number of dictatorships, from Guatemala to Chile, and a numberof people were tortured, executed, forcibly disappeared during this period in Latin America. In the case of Chile, on September the 11th, 1973 the armed forces, led by General Augusto Pinochet, the Commander in Chief of the army, backed by the CIA of the US government, seized power in Chile through a coup d'etat, which deposed the government of the first socialist president democratically elected in the world, ending this revolutionary project underway in this Latin American society. And this dictatorship lasted for 17 long years. It was ended by democratic means, through plebiscite. So he had to call to a plebiscite, he lost the plebiscite, and he had to call to elections. And therefore we recover democracy in March 1990 when I was a teenager.

Rosie Hancock  7:04 
And in terms of the sort of like, you know, the atrocities that we're going to be talking about, do people at the time know that this was going on, or was the government hiding it?

Oriana Bernasconi  7:15 
Well, usually, when the state is the perpetrator, they don't leave any paper trail, you know, accounting for atrocities. They use all these the means they have to erase any trail of these crimes. But what is particular of Chile, that's why we took this case, is that a number of human rights organisations emerge just before the coup d'etat, the first of these organisations started to provide assistance to those repressed 20 days after the coup d'etat. So a very, you know, rapid response. And therefore, in Chile – unlike other countries – we have documentation of mass atrocities with information from, from the very time they were happening. And usually, what do you do, a society ends a period of, you know, civil war or dictatorship, then you start trying to to unfold information to produce the truth of that tragedy. But that's usually something that happens, you know, as part of the transition to democracy, peace, as part of peace building, youknow, kind of practice.

Alexis Hieu Truong  8:28 
And like, would we be right in saying that this particular case was foundational for human rights reporting and the creation of human rights archives at a more global level in other states around the world?

Oriana Bernasconi  8:41 
Yes, because what these organisations – it was a systems of organisations in Chile, also in Argentina there were some – they provide assistance to the repressed. Legal assistance, so sort of reinstalling the right to legal defence, even in a dictatorship, that's very courageous thing to do. They would provide psychological and social assistance. You have to bear in mind that sometimes there was a family and both parents were taken, you know, by the armed forces. Those childrens were left by themselves and so, actually, there was one organisation that was in charge of particularly of children and very traumatised children. It was a specific form of resistance, but it was a form of resistance, very active. So they would, they would assist victims, but they would do this work very publicly. You know, they would also denounce human rights abuses, they would produce reports every month, every year, stating what they were finding, you know, through these individual testimonies. So they did a lot of what we call sociological work, in terms of, you know, transforming a testimony into information, classifying kind of repressive acts, and keep information about their behaviour throughout the years. They would use the structure of the Chilean church, or the Catholic Church, to spread this information throughout the country and also to international agencies who would then, you know, help in the annunciation and, you know, spread this information around the world. It was very clever in terms of, if you want sociology of organisation. It was a very clever, you know, way of organising things, both to make these organisations to last the whole dictatorship, and also to to legitimate their work both nationally, internationally, and to make everyone know about these crimes. You know, you know, disseminate the truth of the victims. It wasn't easy. The whole state, with the media, spreading their own version of the, these enemies. You know, there was a lot of montage in the, in the media saying that they were killing themselves, that they were, you know, traitors and a lot of things. And therefore information, and very, very acute information was very important to confront. That's why we say that what these organisations can do is to sort of make the, the reality of state violence visible for, for the whole society.

Rosie Hancock  11:26 
I mean, one brilliant and like very moving example that you and your colleagues highlight of this kind of work, this, that the organisations were doing, is this huge document that translates as "The Sheet". I think you describe it as a kind of analogue Excel sheet, and it seems significant because it's about building a picture of abuses, not as random but as systematic. Can you tell us more about that, that document?

Oriana Bernasconi  11:56 
Yeah. In this human rights archives, you would find very different kind of artifacts, papers obviously, also photographs, ID cards showing that the existence of those disappeared, pieces of even fabric of the clothes the person was wearing that day, the day they were captured. And you will also find in the archive of the main of these organisations called Vicaría de la Solidaridad – Vicariate of Solidarity – these handmade spreadsheets that were piece of paper glued together, so very hand craft made, with a number of fields of information. The one we work more with has 42 fields of information about more than 100 people that were killed, disappeared in 1976 and this spreadsheet was organised by month and day of the month, showing this systematicity. So this wasn't, you know, an individual case. This was a state policy of mass, you know, violence against members of the Communist Party, in particular "Batir". It has six handwriting styles on it, so it's, you know, and you can have an idea with that of the collective nature of this endeavour. It was done by the human rights organisation with the help of the relatives of the disappeared, that would go to the clandestine political parties to get some pieces of information to try to fill gaps. And so you can have an idea of how, especially in the case of enforced disappearance – what we call the detenidos desaparecidos – it was a crime, it wasn't a crime, we, we knew, you know, beforehand. So they were trying, these, these social workers, lawyers, social, sociologists at these organisations, were trying to make sense of a crime we didn't know it had existed. You can have a sense of they trying to fill gaps of information, to try with any new data to ameliorate harm, to try to find people alive, to try to save lives.

Alexis Hieu Truong  14:15 
I was going to, you make that link between these artifacts as they become technologies, right? And I think you mentioned like technologies of denunciation or technologies of memories. Is that correct?

Oriana Bernasconi  14:28 
Yeah, we call them technologies of memory in the sense that they help us to understand and to also commemorate. You know, it's just, it's obviously, it's they're technologies of information, in the way they were used. This goal is just not information, It's information in order to intervene, it's knowledge for intervention and you know, as I said, to ameliorate damage. But also in the long run, in the long term they are technologies of memory. We can, we can, you know, go backto those, those days. We can, we can have access to the testimonies, first hand testimonies, of those that lived these experiences.

Alexis Hieu Truong  15:15 
And this kind of gives us insight in how we can start to see why a science and technology studies approach is valuable to the study of human rights, yes. Like, can you explain to us what science and technology studies is?

Oriana Bernasconi  15:29 
Yeah, it's a an interdisciplinary field of scholarship that is interested in the relationship of sciences, knowledge, technologies. It's a field very diverse, so you can use it in different areas, in our case of sociology. It's not very common in human rights and in politics, but we are, you know, trying to make some progress in making these topics to relate to STS.

Alexis Hieu Truong  16:03 
So you say it's not very common. So what would you say are some of the things that it brings to the study of human rights?

Oriana Bernasconi  16:11 
Well, for us, many things. I would say that I wouldn't have been conducting research in Chile, but also in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, about how we document atrocities, and in my case, I wouldn't have come to this idea of, you know, these infrastructures and these, these artifacts and these devices, without STS scholarship. My main focus of attention are documents and papers, artifacts, it's not human beings, although they speak about human beings in very powerful ways. They tell us how horrible we can harm each other, but also how we can be, solidarity can be built up, you see, can come forward to help those repairs. And also, I'm concerned with questions about how things hang together and how they are sustained over time, how you know these documents travel across time and space. That's a very STS question. In sociology we're more used to think about – that's the way I was trained, at least – how, you know, social issues are emerged and maybe how are they reproduced, but this question of how they are sustained, so the kind of effort you have to make to sustain something as a social formation, that's something that I'm bringing from STS. We, for example, build up new, new concepts. We work with the idea when, when we are following these objects from the archives – in the 70s to a judicial trial in Buenos Aires in 2016 – how this use, for example, a strong declaration is used by the judge to convict somebody, to make justice. We speak about objects being transposed into other fields. We also have expanded some concepts, as I said, artifact infrastructure. So we speak about technologies of memory, or in a new project we are starting now, infrastructure of knowledge, so they all come from, from STS. And also in terms of methods, what we did in these archives is, is an ethnography of archives, and we use the idea of "infrastructure inversion" from Bowker and Leigh Star in "Sorting Things Out". So exploring the, all the materiality that is behind, that supports the job, you know, these human rights defenders did. Yeah, so that's some, some things that we take from STS.

Alexis Hieu Truong  18:45 
So these artifacts are kind of in the background sometimes, right? But, but from hearing you speak we really get that sense that they, they speak to collective issues and collective possibilities, also possibly. And as you say, you've, you've done work on archives. I mean, they're often see maybe as a kind of like a dead space, like full of paper rather than people, and kind of the end result, maybe, of something instead of the start of something new. But we really get the sense that you see archives differently. Could you tell us a bit more about how you approach and define archives?

Oriana Bernasconi  19:28 
Yeah, I think of archives as social organisms, so quite alive. Of course, there are traces of human action in the sense I just have been speaking of. In in the case of human rights archives they are those that document systematic state-led abuses of power through violence, but they also tell about resistance to harm, so how people get organised, the actions of denunciation, the claims of justice, the search for the missing, the call for international pressure on the repressive government. It's important to bear in mind that human rights archives are not only about atrocity, they are also about how we come forward as human beings to try to put an end to these repressive periods, and that's something we as sociologists need to bring because it's part of, you know, social learning, and you know, capacities that we have to buildup in our societies, in our communities. And in that sense, we also have the book, it's about, basically it's about a third actor, is the one that assists the victims and register the, these events. And usually when you think about violence and political violence, you would have two actors, the perpetrator and the victim. But here, if you think about these issues from the point of view of the archive, of the human rights archive, a third actor will come to the scene, which is that that mediates this relationship, that made it public, that documents this human harm, human violation. So yeah, and I think these archives are very, a compelling antidote to oblivion, to revisioning, to ignorance. So we, when you don'thave these archives, impunity would prevail. And that's, that's very complicated when you, when you have to recover a society from, you know, these episodes, it's very difficult to keep peace, to strengthen democracy, if what prevails is ignorance and impunity. And I think in the big picture – in a more, if you want, anthropological sense – these archives teach us about cognitive, political, affective actions, the humanisation, no, but also of you know, confronting that those, those forces. I found them very sociological objects and production, social productions or products. And I'm interested both in the product, what seems, what is in the archive, what they are, and the functions. You know, which functions do they serve throughout the years – the decades, in the case of Chile, 50 years from the coup d'etat – but also as a practice, you can, and that's where, you know, it gets more sociological. So which knowledge are gathered in this archive, what they can do, you know, which kind of actions follow. And also something that we have added – and is not very much in the, you know, hegemonic literature – is how you can also trace kinship lineages in the archives. So a lot of affective dimension, how bonds are forged through the recognition of common pain, how people got together to search for the missing, the loved ones, and so how a number of communities we have in the whole Latin America, the organisations of the relatives of the victims of those days and of these days. And they, the documentation and the archives are very important, because they tell you, you, you and you are searching for the same kind of victim. So go together.

Rosie Hancock  23:21 
Some of these questions that you ask about the archives – that they're a product, but they're also a practice, and you know, what are the knowledges that are contained within it, and all of these – it's really making me think about some decolonising archival work I've come across recently in Australia. And I saw this amazing film by the artist Jazz Money,  Winhanganha – which I think we'll probably add to our show notes – and she used footage collected by the Australian National Film and Sound archive, a lot of which was really racist on sort of Indigenous Australians over, dating a long way back in Australian history. And she created this amazing film about Indigenous Australia and history and resistance and resilience using this archival footage, sort of patched into this incredible patchwork, and it both drew attention to so many of the assumptions and values that underpin the creation of the archive and what was sort of chosen to be selected in the first place and all of that kind of thing, but at the same time, was able to tell this incredible news story aswell. And it's just, yes, it was just a really fascinating, amazing film. And it kind of makes me feel like some of what you're talking about here, it's almost like the archive is, is a kind of intellectual archeological site, in a way. And I'm curious about, you know, you've, you've spoken about quite a few different disciplinary areas already, but you know, speaking a bit more about your disciplinary inspiration. Sociology, anthropology, archeology maybe.

Oriana Bernasconi  25:04 
Yeah, probably more about from sociology and social theory. To think about archives in these terms, I have used pragmatic philosophy because I'm interested in the way, in the effects, you know, how archives are used or the documents. So instead of the question of what language is or documents are, I'm more concerned with the question of what this document or this knowledge that is built in these archives are used, and with which effects, which realities they help to produce. So that's in the branch of pragmatic theory. And then also, there are a number of works that I use a lot, such as Jacques Derrida, who has, you know, this idea of the forces that rule an archive, and he plays with this idea of two forces. One is the creative, you know, the creative force that institute, that create, that, you know, label, that join things together, that enunciates. And the other is the force that excludes, that organises. And this is a very, veryuseful way of thinking about archives, because, as we have been saying, you know, you in the archive, you have a parcel of reality. You don't have everything there, especially if you are talking about this very difficult kind of knowledge.And also I have used a lot of Michel Foucault. I work with genealogies, so this idea of moving around time to see how, if you go today to the memory museum in Chile, you would have the truth commission reports at the beginning of the tour. And this truth commission I know, because of the research I've done, that the cases that are there belong to, or were, you know, they started to be recorded in the 70s in these human rights organisations. So I do this genealogical work, and Foucault is very key in thinking of knowledge and the relationship between knowledge and power, and how you can, you know, confront power through knowledge. I think also, and that's something that you can bring into sociology and sociological thinking, how in the way you these human rights violations were inscribed over time, a certain enunciative regime was forged. The way we enunciate human rights atrocities. So, a whole grammar, if you want, was built and is still being used nowadays, pretty much in the way it was set up in those years. And I also work with some philosophers, women. I'm a feminist scholar, so I'm also very much concerned of bringing, you know, woman scholarship. So first, Hannah Arendt, and this idea of the "space of appearance" is very powerful to me, because you canalso think that what this documentation of atrocity does is to bring this reality into, into social view, you know, give the, give a space to this harm. I think that's a very, very sociological question. What's, what's the space we as societies, in which space do we reserve to, to the harm we produce? That's a question that Hannah Arendt does.

Rosie Hancock  28:38 
I mean, you've already, you have already mentioned, actually, this idea of kinship, being able to find kinship ties in the archive. And am I right that you see archives as being able to connect the living and the dead together as well, so both kind of people to one another, but also, I guess, across history as well.

Oriana Bernasconi  28:59 
Yes, you're right, and they do it in a number of ways. During the repressive regime, it was a way of connecting the relatives, you know, those who were searching for their loved ones, with each other but with also with this hope of – what Derrida says – this deferral, you know, this hope that they would find them at the end, you know, at some point. So it's this kind of, you know, things that this mass atrocities do to our notions of time and temporality. And also they connect the living and the death in the long term. For example, because we have these archives, they are nowadays places of memory, so new generations can connect with this story firsthand, going to these archives. So, they can exercise what is called the "intergenerational right to historical truth". We know a number of cases of, for example, grandchildren whose relative's story has not been shared within the family, and they go to the archive to try to find it, because they know that there is something that they want to know. And even what we have in Latin America is, is a movement of disobedience. These are relatives of the perpetrators, you know, the son and the niece that don't want to be part of that story, of that kinship, of that lineage, and they decide to join human rights, a human rights course, even sometimes, they change the names as well. And so they go to this archive to learn how their, you know, relatives did to other human beings. They in that sense, they help to restore wounded communities, you know, and they help in commemoration. In the Chilean case – and I would say in, yeah, in general, in Argentina, in Uruguay, in Peru, in Colombia, in Mexico – these archives are being used to memory exercises and practices in schools to, you know, nowadays to teach children about citizenship, about the importance of democracy. Also about, you know, state violence, but not just about that, you know, how to prevent. So, they help in what we call, try to guarantee the non-repetition of these atrocities. So, in that way, they can connect, if you, if they keep being, you know, stored in a, in agood way, you can, you know, make a lot of these archives over the years.

Alexis Hieu Truong  31:54 
You've already introduced us to this idea of technologies of memory, which I believe you've developed with your colleagues, Elizabeth Lira and Marcela Ruiz. Could you expand a bit on that, and me particularly about the related idea of inscription? So my sense, and something you've mentioned, is that there's something to be said about turning a moment or an experience into knowledge and that knowledge then being able to travel beyond the original context, is that right?

Oriana Bernasconi  32:27 
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's this idea that this, all this materiality, you know, papers, typewriters or forms that we use to collect information, this spreadsheet where that we speak about, or they help to make human rights violations conceivable, legible, visible, all this practice of naming them, you know, give them a name. We didn't have a name for enforced disappearance before this crime was committed in Latin America. So all that knowledge comes from this very micro practices of naming, organising, classifying, compiling, you know, keeping record of, using, disseminating, because in the field of memory studies – which where sort of part of my work goes to – there is a prevalence of testimonies as a way of speaking about atrocities. So this idea of, well, yeah, the testimonies need these technologies, you know, in the sense of, you know, this whole materiality, even the archive, or you know that you need to archive information in order to retrieve it in a later moment. So, let's pay attention to all this infrastructure that supports human rights work.

Rosie Hancock  33:59 
I mean, one of the things we've sort of not talked about a lot yet is the fact that these technologies, you know, the artifacts, they could also – I suppose – be forces for harm, in the sense that, you know, to make a record or to document something, or to, you know, register something, is also an act of omission or an act of exclusion in and of itself, right? There are things that are not, you know, there are decisions being made about what to capture, what not to capture, and similarly, the technologies themselves could also be used to sort of commit atrocities and abuses. So, like, I'm thinking here of something like census data on ethnic identity being used to later discriminate against people, you know, or maybe, yeah, like, just about how practices of documentation and data gathering and even you know, just the concept of technologies more broadly, could get a bad name. You know, it could contribute to genocide or, I mean, even something as simple as a data breach. And I'm curious about how you think about that as a sociologist working on the use of data gathering in a positive context, whether you give much thought to, you know, how these acts of gathering data might also have negative consequences?

Oriana Bernasconi  35:26 
Yes, of course, that's a very good point. You, we have gas chambers, we use technology to poison people, to produce bombs, so to put that technology to very, very harmful uses. And also in terms of archives, we have to bear in mind that we also as societies, we also have what we call archives of atrocities or archive of evil, or there are number of names, so these are the archives of the perpetrators, sometimes, like in Argentina, for example, they have recovered the archiveof the police, also in Guatemala, and you can put the archive of the perpetrators to a human right use if you recover it, to try to make sense of what happened, to gather information, to bring the perpetrator to justice, so you can produce a number of human rights practices or actions through the archive of the perpetrator. So that's why the pragmatics of it is important, because you know, in either way you can, you can use it for good or bad reasons. It depends on the function and the use you make of them.

Rosie Hancock  36:48 
Oriana, we're going to be back in just a moment to talk about a thinker or some thinkers who've inspired you. But first a word from Michaela.

Michaela Benson  36:59 
Hi there, this is Michaela Benson, the Chief Executive of the Sociological Review Foundation. Thanks for joining us to hear from Oriana Bernasconi, from Alberto Hurtado University, Chile, talk about her work on archives and state violence, shedding new light on life admin. We're really enjoying putting season three together so far, and have covered subjects from coffee culture to burnout, joined in conversation by scholars from around the world. We've been working really hard to make sure that the podcast is a valuable resource. If you've been to thesociologicalreview.org, perhaps to check out our show notes or our other podcasts, you might have clocked that the Sociological Review Foundation is a charity. We're a charity that's committed to advancing public understandings of sociology, something that we believe is needed now more than ever. And so we want to ask you a favour, if you're able to please consider making a contribution to help us keep bringing this podcast to you. Just head over to donorbox.org/uncommon-sense, and you can follow all the directions to make a one off or repeat donation, which will go to directly supporting the making of Uncommon Sense. And in case you didn't catch that URL, if you scroll down in our show notes, you'll find a link to take you directly there. Thanks to everybody who's contributed so far and to those who are considering doing it in the future, it really does make a difference to what we're able to do. And of course, we're also grateful to all of you who are listening in. If you've got any comments, suggestions or feedback, please drop us a line at Uncommon Sense, at thesociologicalreview.org.

Rosie Hancock  39:05 
Okay, Oriana, here's where we want to turn to hear about a thinker that gave, or maybe gives you still, some Uncommon Sense. It doesn't have to be a sociologist. It could be a person whose whole life's work has inspired you, or maybe the author of a particular book that made you think differently as a student or an early career researcher. You tell us, who are they?

Oriana Bernasconi  39:28 
Well, a number of authors. I've been in this field for 10 years, so I've been collecting good friends to think along. Pragmatic theory, to think about how words or speech acts but also written words can have a role, are used in social action, and with which effects. Also a number of authors with which I've been thinking about archive in this more, as we said, sociological or anthropological way. Michel Foucault, as well, as I mentioned, in terms of thinking about, as sociologists, you're usually trying to think about contemporary issues and contemporary society, not too much about – although there is historical sociology, but – not too much in terms of, you know, going back some years, some decades. And I've been using this genealogical method to think about the actuality, how our actuality has been built up.So, I feel I'm very much a sociologist, even though I have been working with the main, you know, tragedy of my society, which is, you know, date backs to the 70s, so 50 years ago, but still, I think that it can tell us a lot about who we are nowadays. Also I work with Judith Butler because I'm interested in the performativity of documents, but also of archives.She helped me to think about discursive and non-discursive practices and how they help certain phenomenons to appear. She works with the idea of gender to be a social construction and you can think about patriarchal system as a social construction as well. And I try to think about this different political violence as a social fact and how it is built andalso, you know, how we resist this kind of practices. And in that sense, for example, from Butler, it's important in terms ofperformativity to think about first, I use it for example, to think about of the subject of political violence, how they disappear, the technique has been performed over time. So, I do a sociology of the subject without the subject, because it's, you know, it has disappeared. So, I follow the different devices that have helped us to sustain this figure over time, the forensic device, the human rights device, the justice device, the affective device of the family that remembers them. And so Judith Butler is very important in that sense, because it helps you to think about performativity as a collective endeavor and not as a singular or individual production.

Alexis Hieu Truong  42:45 
We've touched on this idea of performativity in a prior episode with Kareem, with Kareem Khubchandani on performance but could you remind us what performativity is?

Oriana Bernasconi  43:02 
Yeah. I use the idea of bringing something into existence, you know. And what is key here, what is something that she, Butler, takes from from the pragmatics of language is the idea that, for example, gender is a construction and there is a lot of, you know, social activity behind that construction. There is this idea of iteration, so you have to repeat gender norms in order for them to be sustained in society too. So, gender is something that is performed daily. You know, it's very ordinary and everyday in the way we speak, in the way we select things and way we exclude, in the way we use ourbodies. So, in very mundane and repetitive and ordinary practices and representations we perform, we bring into life, wedo it again and again and again in certain ways. That's the normativity of it.

Alexis Hieu Truong  44:09 
And it connects also to these elements that you've mentioned about power, for example, with Foucault and the archives and so on, as maybe mundane tasks associated with inscription and so on, kind of have powerful consequences subsequently.

Oriana Bernasconi  44:27 
Yeah and for us, it's, it's very important also in Derrida, this idea of iteration. So it's the power of this human rights organisation relies to certain extent in these violations be recorded once and again, you know, and keeping track of them. So, it's just not, not just, you know, recall the testimony you gave because of the disappearance of your father, let's say, but also all the actions that you've made during the years to try to search for him. And even if, for example, somebody was released from prison for any of the clandestine detention centres that they had and when went to the Vicaría, to one of these organisations of human rights to give testimony as a witnesses, not just as victims, as a witnesses of what he saw. And he would say, I was in jail with this, this and this person. This piece of information goes to your folder, for the folder, of the folder of your father. And so you would be, you know, putting things together, you know, it's a kind of puzzle, you know, bringing pieces of the story together and trying to glue them together to make sense of, to try to to reproduce the trajectory of, of those that were detained. And so this repetitive, this iterativity is very important to, you know, sustain this practice and to bring, you know, new information and to collect and put them together. And also, we say that the livelihood of human rights archives relies in its citationality, so that they are they areused, you know, that people use them as a source of information. They are kept alive if they appear in a textbook for children in the school, or if they appear in a documentary or in a novel.

Alexis Hieu Truong  46:23 
Rosie had mentioned the aspects of omissions and exclusions, right? But by using these authors like Austin, Judith Butler, Derrida, you're really bringing to light some of the things that are, well, the actions but also the people that exist right next to the archives, right? So, it really sheds, it brings us to see in a not so common sense, right, the archives and what we assume them to be.

Rosie Hancock  46:54 
Oriana, thank you for talking us through the concept of performativity and introducing us to the works of Derrida and Butler. We'll be putting links to those works in our show notes. But before we go, we wanted to grab one other thing to add to our show notes, if that's okay, and that's your recommendation of something that speaks to our theme today, which is paperwork, a pop cultural item, or at least a non academic item, let's say.

Oriana Bernasconi  47:24 
There are many, as I said, novels that used, actually, our archival work to tell the story, different stories about the atrocities, but also how we make sense of them. There's, yeah, a very nice book about parenthood that is written by, by the son of the disappeared. And it's very nice because he tells this whole story of the disappearance and the search and justice. But also, for me, it's actually a book about parenthood because it tells how he managed to build bond with a father that he lost when he was four years old. Also, I would recommend a audio visual production that is called Una Historia Necesaria, Needed Story I guess. It's comprised of 16 episodes – of five minutes, episodes – that narrate real stories about victims of forced disappearance mainly, of the Chilean dictatorship. What I like of it is that it is based, obviously, in the archives, but also in truth reports, truth commission reports, judicial research. So, how the archive is been filled up with other archives of other, you know, social entities such as the judicial in very, in a very short time, you know, they tell the story of one of these victims, but in a very effective way. So, they connect you very effectively with the experience of losing somebody through state violence, so I think it is very well done and it uses the audio visual resources very, very effectively in that sense.

Alexis Hieu Truong  49:30 
In connection to that, it makes me think about – in terms of popular culture, right – a piece that was produced by Patrick Keating, that's a theatrical piece, basically, that's been digitalised that's called Inside/Out, where he tells his story of being inside the Canadian carceral system. And in that piece, he kind of always refers to his file as a prisoner, right? So, guards telling him, I'll put it in your file, social workers saying, I'll put it in your file, and never being able to see that file and, and knowing what is there that's, that's basically telling his life story, right, but from the the view of others. So that's something that I might recommend in terms of, yeah, archives, important archives, in connection to people that are victims. Thank you very much, Oriana. That's all the time we have for today. Thank you very much for joining us.

Oriana Bernasconi  50:26 
Thank you for inviting me.

Rosie Hancock  50:29 
We'll be sure to put the different readings and thinkers who Oriana mentioned into our show notes, plus more about the history of Chile. Those show notes can all be found in the app you're using to hear this and on the podcast page at thesociologicalreview.org. There, as ever, you can also browse our themed magazine, enjoy our other podcasts, and take a look at the Sociological Review Journal and much more.

Alexis Hieu Truong  50:53  
Our sound engineer was Dave Crackles, and our producers were Emma Houlton and Alice Bloch. We'll be back soon with more Uncommon Sense. Thanks for listening, bye.