The project adopts two key methods of data collection, including attendance at a wide range of commemorative events and conducting individual interviews with Rwandan community members and running follow-up focus groups in the three case study areas. The first year of the project was spent identifying and building relationships with key survivor organisations in my three case study areas. During the 25th anniversary of the genocide in 2019 I attended numerous commemorative events, conferences, study days and cultural activities organised by the Rwandan community (33 in total). However, due to COVID-19, fieldwork – particularly the interview-based research – planned for the commemoration period in 2020 was impossible and, as a result, during the final six months of the project, I turned my focus to examine the intergenerational transmission of memory and the educational materials that have been produced to teach the history of the genocide in Belgian, French and British schools. The project will continue to be developed at Newcastle University, and it is anticipated that the fieldwork for the project (especially interviews and attendance at commemorative events) will be completed in 2021.
Dissemination activities included presentations at 6 international academic conferences, a keynote lecture at the SFPS International Conference in 2019, invited talks at UC-Louvain and University of Warwick, and participation in two outreach activities, including a Schools Workshop at City Hall, London, in May 2019 and the Festival de la Francophone in Oxford in March 2020. 3 further events due to take place in 2020 have been postponed to 2021. I was awarded the SAGE Memory Studies Journal and MSA Outstanding First Book Award 2019 for my research monograph From Surviving to Living: Voice, Trauma and Witness in Rwandan Women’s Writing (Pulm, 2018) and, as the recipient of this award, I organised the MSA Book Award Panel at the Memory Studies Association Conference in Madrid, June 2019.
Written outputs include an article and two book reviews that have been submitted for publication, and a further three articles currently in preparation. I also contributed a piece to the Newsletter of the Belgian Cooperation in and with Rwanda, Embassy of Belgium in Kigali, ‘Commemorating Genocide in the Rwandan Diaspora’, which was published in April 2019. Two further relevant publications came out during the course of the fellowship, including a book chapter and a book co-edited with Kate McLoughlin and Niall Munro, On Commemoration: Global Reflections upon Remembering War (Peter Lang, 2020).
