Memory and attribution of responsibility in the discourse of human rights violations: a study of the 2019 Chilean social outburst
(2023) Language and Memory conference — Location: Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom (5.June.2023)
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- The discursive analysis of human rights violations is particularly interesting because it can contribute to memory studies and the understanding of how to remember these traumatic events, as several authors have shown. In the Hispanic context, Oteíza (2020) studies the discursive resources used in history classroom interactions for the construction and transmission of memory about the abuses committed during the Chilean dictatorship (1973-90). Other authors work on human rights reports, arguing that their informative function participates in the transmission of memory (De Cock et al., 2019; De Cock & Michaud Maturana, 2014; 2018). However, little attention has been dedicated to the analysis of discourses published in more recent contexts, even though they are influencing the construction of memory in actual generations and will influence its transmission to future generations. This presentation intends to fill this gap. It will indeed analyse the discursive construction of human rights violations in human rights reports published during the 2019 Chilean social outburst, with a focus on the attribution of responsibility to perpetrators. Given that agentivity and responsibility are closely related (Villalba Ibáñez, 2017), the corpus is studied in light of the concept of agentivity. Consequently, the analysis will be based essentially on the levels of agentivity developed by De Cock and Michaud Maturana (2014; 2018), who have considered various criteria such as the nature of the perpetrators’ reference, its syntactic function and the transitivity of the verb. The corpus studied is made of Spanish human rights reports published by Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Office in the context of the 2019 Chilean social protests. The aim of this presentation is to highlight how different conceptualizations of agentivity can influence the attribution of responsibility and the construction of memory of human rights violations.
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Pécher, S. (2023). Memory and attribution of responsibility in the discourse of human rights violations: a study of the 2019 Chilean social outburst. Language and Memory conference, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/213252