Life admin often refers to the overwhelming and mundane paperwork that surrounds contemporary living. However, Oriana Bernasconi, a sociology professor at the Alberto Hurtado University in Chile, joins Uncommon Sense to talk about a more serious side of the term – that of paperwork documenting human rights abuse – as well as a living, breathing archive and the analogue spreadsheet.

Author of “Resistance to Political Violence in Latin America: Documenting Atrocity”, Oriana talks about her substantial research in human rights archives documenting the atrocities that took place during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. She also talks us through “technologies of memory” and how archives have allowed the living to connect with the dead.

Plus: Oriana introduces us to the works of Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida around performativity and gives her pop culture recommendation for the 16-part TV series “Una historia necesaria”.

Guest: Oriana Bernasconi
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Guest Producer: Emma Houlton
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

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Episode Resources

Rosie, Alexis and Oriana recommended

• WINHANGANHA – film by Jazz Money
• Inside/Out: A Prison Memoir – theatre production by Patrick Keating
• Una Historia Necesaria – TV series by Hernán Caffiero

By Oriana Bernasconi

• Resistance to Political Violence in Latin America: Documenting Atrocity
• Political Technologies of Memory: Uses and Appropriations of Artefacts that Register and Denounce State Violence (co-authored with Elizabeth Lira and Marcela Ruiz)
• Archives of Violence: Case studies from South America (co-authored with Vikki Bell, Jaime Hernández-García and Cecilia Sosa)

From The Sociological Review

• The aesthetics of memory: Ruins, visibility and witnessing – Margarita Palacios
• The digital writing of human rights narratives: Failure, recognition, and the unruly inscriptions of database infrastructures – Josh Bowsher

Further resources

• the publications of the Tecnologías Políticas de la Memoria project
• “Documenting Dictatorship: Writing and Resistance in Chile's Vicaría de la Solidaridad” – Vikki Bell
• “Documentality: Why it is Necessary to Leave Traces” – Maurizio Ferraris
• “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” – Judith Butler

Read more about the concept of Speeach Acts, as well as the work of Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida.

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