Visualizing Survivors’ Voices

In this event we will combine the perspective of witnesses, artists and researchers to show the ways in which personal narratives of mass violence are recorded and shared in this medium. The project Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives, initiated in Canada, investigates how visual narratives can help amplify the voices of survivors of genocidal and other mass violence.

How can they work in dialogue with graphic novel artists to interpret and record their experiences? How can we share these narratives in meaningful ways? Amongst others, the project includes a Syrian war refugee who escaped physical violence. During this event a witness, an artist and researchers explore in what ways graphic novels can capture stories of violence and genocide. As a creative interpretation, graphic novels do not claim to provide a direct or all-encompassing record of events, yet they visualize their later impact. 

This international project builds on a prior collaboration between witnesses, researchers and graphic novelists that focused on narrative art, visual storytelling and education around Holocaust and human rights. From this, two graphic novels recently emerged: But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Emmie Arbel. The Color of Memory. 

About the speakers 

Akram al-Saud  is from Deir Ez-Zor and now lives in the Netherlands. He was arrested four times before fleeing from Syria. His longest detention began on March 28th, 2010 —before the revolution — and lasted for nine months. At the time, he was a student at the Faculty of Architecture in Aleppo and was arrested by the intelligence services of the air force. After the 2011 revolution, he was arrested three more times.   

Andrea Webb spent a decade as a classroom teacher and department head before returning to higher education as a teacher educator at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests lie in teaching and learning in higher education, and she is involved in research projects related to Threshold Concepts, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), and Social Studies Teacher Education. She is the co-director of the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives Project.  

Charlotte Schallié  is a Professor of Germanic Studies and Chair of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her teaching and research interests include memory studies, visual culture studies & graphic narratives, teaching and learning about the Holocaust, and genocide and human rights education. She edited the graphic novel But I Live portraying four Holocaust survivors, and she is project lead and co-director of the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives Project.  

Kees Ribbens  is a historian working at the NIOD Institute in Amsterdam and endowed Professor of Popular Historical Culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam with a keen interest in the ways in which wars and genocides are remembered and represented. Ribbens is an avid reader of graphic novels.  

Tobi Dahmen  grew up in Wesel on the Rhine and studied visual communication in Düsseldorf. From 1999, he has been working as a comic artist and illustrator. Since 2008, he lives in Utrecht. His 2015 graphic novel Fahrradmod (published in German and Dutch editions) won the Rudolph Dirks Award in the category ‘Best Scenario’. In 2024, his new graphic novel Columbusstrasse, eine Familiengeschichte (about his family’s history of WWII), was published by Carlsen and was recently also published in French.  

Uğur Ümit Üngör is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute. His main areas of interest are genocide and mass violence, with a particular focus on the modern and contemporary Middle East. He is co-leading the Research cluster Iraq & Syria in the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives Project.