Baldy Center Distinguished Speaker Nicole Fox

[Baldy Center]

Event schedule and format subject to change, please check The Baldy Center event website for updates and registration: http://www.buffalo.edu/baldycenter/events/calendar.html

Nicole Fox (California State University Sacramento)

After Genocide: Memory and Reconciliation in Rwanda
FEBRUARY 18, 2022—DISTINGUISHED SPEAKER
509 O’Brian Hall; 12:00pm
Co-sponsored with UB Department of Sociology.
Advanced registration is required. Registration details forthcoming.

Abstract: Memorials are powerful mechanisms for societies transitioning from mass atrocity to more peaceful ones. In this talk, Dr. Nicole Fox analyzes how memorials impact the aftermath of atrocity, documenting how state narratives to remember the past often marginalize financially distressed survivors, women, and orphans. Drawing on extensive interviews with Rwandan genocide survivors, and a decade of ethnographic fieldwork, Dr. Fox reveals survivors’ relationship to these spaces and how they impact various reconciliation processes. By analyzing the varied perspectives, decisions, and actions that create collective memories, Dr. Fox illustrates how the amplification of inequality over time shapes present-day crime, victimology, and law.

Speaker Bio: Nicole Fox, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at California State University Sacramento. Her research centers on how racial and ethnic contention impacts communities, with a focus on how remembrances of adversity shape social change and collective memory. Her most recent project examines individuals who conducted acts of rescue during episodes of mass violence, theorizing the social factors that shape such high-risk actions. Her 2021 book (University of Wisconsin Press) focuses on how memorials to past atrocity impacts community development and reconciliation for survivors of genocide and genocidal rape. Her work has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Prevention Innovation Research Center, and the American Sociological Society’s Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline, among others. Her scholarship has been published in Social Forces, Social Problems, Signs, Sociological Forum, Deviant Behavior, Journal of Genocide Research and others.