Witness

Geographers have long been concerned with witnessing. Underpinning this broad corpus is a belief that “better” witnessing moves us towards a more progressive, and even liberatory politics. There is an imperative that witnessing itself, if approached sensitively, would provide a meaningful response to realities of violence, harm, and abuse. This chapter asks: How do we make sense of forms of witnessing that have no interest in participating in a restorative project and the reaffirmation of the liberal logic that acts of witnessing often provide? What do we do with registers of testimony that actively refuse and violate liberal sensibilities? This chapter suggests we need to pay greater attention to the figure of the unrepentant witness, and how it redefines the political community who are its audience.