SEMINÁRIO CEAS

(Re)Searching for the Kārthigai Poo: Mapping post-conflict accountability

Speaker: Dalia N.  (CRIA-Iscte)

Date and Venue
ISCTE, Room A202, Building 4
Online via Zoom
Registration required: vera.lazzaretti@iscte-iul.pt

Description

This dissertation maps the becomings of post-conflict accountability as an ungovernable, situated praxis of mutual recovery, focusing on the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009) and the ongoing genocidal violence against the enfranchised Tamil minority.

Research intent emerges through the positional entanglements of Indian-Tamil ethnicity, Indian citizenship, and the distant witnessing of Tamil suffering in Sri Lanka. This intent is cartographically traced by triangulating standardized civil war narratives, timelines of witness(ing), and the unfolding of the research process itself.

The dissertation frames research intent as a self-generating response-ability—resisting containment by audit cultures—and posits ethics as inseparable from subjectivity, calling for intimate forms of militancy.

By adapting patchwork ethnography (Günel, Gökçe, & Watanabe, 2024), the research engages with field entanglements to show that even plurivocal conceptualisation and praxis remain insufficient to fully escape the totalising tendencies of knowledge production (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980).

Bionote

Dalia is an autistic first-generation graduate with Indian-Tamil and Malayali roots from Chennai in the southernmost Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Dalia uses they/them pronouns. They are a doctoral scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar in the discipline of humanities and social sciences. Their doctoral work builds an ethics of response-ability in reference to Sri Lanka's genocidal civil war and Tamil solidarity since, by using conceptualisations and tools from phenomenology and ethnography. Their research interests are genocide and state violence, rhizomatics, nomadic subjectivity and mutual ethics of care. Their doctoral dissertation is supervised by Dr. Angus Mcblane and Dr. Rosa Maria Perez. They are presently with CRIA, ISCTE as a visiting researcher till July 2025.