On 17-18 September 2026, CLIC will be hosting the international symposium "Violence, Translation, and Testimonial Authority: Ethics and Transmediality in Life-Writing" in Brussels (Cloud 7 & Campus Etterbeek, room I.1.1).
In cooperation with the Centre for Literature in Translation (CLIV, UGent/VUB) & the Centre for Teaching and Research in Postcolonial Studies (CEREP, ULiège), the symposium brings together scholars from Translation Studies, Media Studies, Comparative Literature, Memory Studies, Postcolonial Studies, visual culture studies and the sociology of mediation to examine how violence is transformed, negotiated and reproduced through the translation and transmedial circulation of testimonial life-writing (memoirs, autobiographies, oral histories, prison narratives, documentary accounts and survivor testimonies).
Testimonial forms such as memoirs, autobiographies, oral histories, prison narratives, documentary accounts and survivor testimonies often claim proximity to lived experience. Once these narratives move across languages, media and institutional contexts, violence itself becomes subject to reinterpretation, reframing and epistemic restructuring. The two-day symposium approaches translation not merely as linguistic transfer but as a site where violence can be mediated, intensified, obscured, normalised or contested through practices such as omission, domestication, clarification, standardisation, censorship, subtitling, adaptation and resemiotisation. It examines how transmediality — testimony moving from oral narration to written text, from memoir to film adaptation, from documentary archive to digital circulation — reshapes the visibility of violence and the conditions of witnessing, and how these media transformations contribute to the construction of public memory and global imaginaries of suffering.