dif·fi·cult  /ˈdifəkəlt/     needing much effort or skill to accomplish, deal with, or understand. / characterized by or causing hardships or problems / (of a person) not easy to please or satisfy.

knowl·edge /ˈnäləj/     the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject / awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is to poke and pry with purpose. – Zora Neale Hurston

Course Description

Difficult knowledge is a knowing that poses emotional and epistemological challenges to the individual or collective because of its connection to violence and atrocity. Difficult knowledge is embodied knowledge, a felt theory or way of being in the world that is rooted in traumatic experiences or unsettling truths, and that poses challenges of communicability and representation. It is often highly contested, silenced or institutionally erased. It is also haunting, a violent past that persists and insists on justice.

In this class, we will consider some of the following questions: What does it mean to conduct ethical research and represent individual or collective experiences of violence? To conduct the labour of challenging institutions, and individuals and collectives that deny, silence, or erase living histories of violence? To engage with knowledge that unsettles us, generates discomfort, pain and the impulse to look away? To conduct research on experiences that are not our own? To conduct research on experiences that are ineffable? What are some of the forms of re-presenting difficult knowledge?

We work towards a praxis of on-going learning and unlearning that involves a working through and against silence, erasure and violence reproduced in the academy, policy and media. To do so, we draw on theorists who reckon with difficult knowledge and look to spaces that challenge us, make us uncomfortable, and foster productive encounters.

In the first part of the course, we consider what makes knowledge difficult, and the institutional ways such knowledge is marginalized and denied. We look to case studies of museums, centres for historical memory, archives and national commissions of inquiry that work with difficult knowledge, and their rationales. We draw on forms of theorizing about difficult knowledge that are everyday, visual, poetic and felt. And finally, we reflect on ethics in research, codes of conduct and praxis in the reach towards transformative justice.