Celebrating International Human Rights Day

From December 8 to 10, 2025, Conflict Textiles, Ulster University, INCORE, Queen's University Belfast, and the Tower Museum collaborated on a three-day programme honouring International Human Rights Day. This initiative highlighted the power of textiles and film in addressing human rights issues.

Participants included film students, researchers, activists, curators, and community members, all exploring how textiles and film can serve as vehicles for memory, truth, and justice. Events included film screenings, workshops, exhibitions, and discussions.

On December 10, the Derry-Londonderry Ulster University Campus hosted a special event featuring short films curated by Cinematic Arts student Jessica Buchanan and PhD researcher Tabassum Islam. Following the screenings, attendees engaged in a thought-provoking discussion with filmmaker Esther Vital, Roberta Bacic from Conflict Textiles, and Professors Élise Féron and Brandon Hamber from INCORE. 

The event underscored the vital role of film in fostering community dialogue around human rights. 

Conflict Textiles has curated a page with all the links and events.

Challenges of Intergenerational Healing after Mass Atrocity

We have just a new piece published in Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal. 

Hamber, Brandon and Palmary, Ingrid (2021). A Dance of Shadows and Fires: Conceptual and Practical Challenges of Intergenerational Healing after Mass Atrocity. Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, 15 (3), 100-120 [Download].

Abstract

The legacy of mass atrocity – including colonialism, slavery or specific manifestations such as apartheid – continue long after their demise. Applying a temporal inter-generational lens adds complications. We argue that mass atrocity creates for subsequent generations a deep psychological rupture akin to witnessing past atrocities. This creates a moral liability in the present. Healing is a process dependent on the authenticity (evident in discourse and action) with which we address contemporary problems. A further overriding task is to open social and political space for divergent voices. Acknowledgement of mass atrocity requires more than one-off events or institutional responses (the grand apology, the truth commission). Rather acknowledgement has to become a lived social, cultural and political reality. Without this acknowledgement, healing, either collectively or individually, is stymied. Healing after mass atrocity is as much about political action (addressing inequalities and racism) as an act of re-imaging created through constant and contested re-writing. 

 [Download]