Dr. Susanne Knittel

Rethinking the Margins series:

Staging Ecocide
Speaker: Dr. Susanne Knittel

Discussant: Dr. Luísa Netto

“The question of ecocide is not just a legal or political problem, but it is also a problem of the imagination. What kinds of stories need to be told, what kinds of justice are we seeking, and what are the spaces (legal, political, cultural) where such justice can happen?”


Practical Information
Date and time: Monday 29 April, 16.00 PM - 17.30 PM
Room: Alex Brenninkmeijerzaal
Building: Johanna Hudiggebouw
Address: Achter Sint Pieter 200, Utrecht University
 

Speaker Bio

Susanne C. Knittel is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University. She holds a PhD in Italian and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, New York (2011). Her research centres on the question of how societies remember atrocities — specifically how they deal with the uncomfortable issues of guilt and responsibility — and what role literature, art, film, and other cultural representations play in this process. Her current project focuses on the contemporary cultural imagination of genocide and ecocide. Susanne explores how art and culture can help reveal the historical and structural links between violence against humans and violence against the environment that usually remain unseen.

Susanne teaches courses on 20th and 21st century European and North American literature, literary theory, cultural memory, perpetrator studies, ecocriticism, and posthumanism. She is the co-organizer of the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies, and co-director of the Utrecht Network for Environmental Humanities with Liesbeth van de Grift. Her first book, The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (Fordham University Press, 2015) is a comparative analysis of German and Italian Holocaust memory, focusing on the difficult memories of the Nazi “euthanasia” program and of Italian Fascist eugenic racism. In 2016, it was awarded Honorable Mention by Council of European Studies for the European Studies Book Award. The German translation, Unheimliche Geschichte: Grafeneck, Triest und die Politik der Holocausterinnerung was published with Transcript Verlag in 2018.

Her NWO-VENI project, “Faces of Evil" (2014-17), focused on the role and representation of perpetrators in contemporary memory culture. This project led to the publication, in 2020, of The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies, which she co-edited with Zachary J. Goldberg. She is the founder and director of the Perpetrator Studies Network, which connects scholars across the humanities, social sciences, law, and psychology, as well as curators, artists, and educators from Europe and around the world. She is editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed open access Journal of Perpetrator Research, which she co-founded in 2017 with Emiliano Perra and Ugur Ümit Üngör. From 2016-2022 Susanne was a member of the Utrecht Young Academy, and served as its chair from 2017-2020. She is co-founder and, until 2022, was a board member of the Centre for Unusual Collaborations (CUCo), an initiative of the Young Academies of the strategic alliance between UU, UMCU, TU Eindhoven and Wageningen University & Research that promotes and facilitates opportunities for unusual research collaborations with a view towards societal impact.
 

Discussant Bio

Luísa Netto initially came to the Netherlands in 2019 to conduct postdoctoral research into the right to science at the Amsterdam Center for International Law (ACIL) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), under the supervision of Professor Yvonne Donders. She came to Leiden in 2020, also for postdoctoral research under the supervision of Professor Wim Voermans.

Luísa comes from Brazil, where she worked for more than 20 years as a State Attorney for the State of Minas Gerais. There she worked in the advisory and litigation department, dealing with matters relating to constitutional and administrative law, public services, government procurement, administrative procedures, civil rights vis-à-vis the government, and civil servants' rights. At the same time, she taught administrative law at the Pontífica Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais.

Luísa defended her dissertation at the University of Lisbon in 2015, under the supervision of Professor Sérvulo Correia. The thesis – The Openness of the Fundamental Rights System of the Rule of Law – dealt with the configuration of the system of fundamental rights and examined its evolutionary capacity, in particular to acquire new rights. The thesis is part of other publications dedicated to fundamental rights, with an emphasis on rights in administrative relations and fundamental social rights, that Luísa published within the Portuguese-speaking community.

In her academic activities at Leiden University, Luísa devotes herself to teaching, especially constitutional law for bachelor's and master's degrees. In terms of research activities, having settled in the Netherlands, her research interests are related to the role of fundamental rights in the Dutch constitutional order and the ongoing need to investigate the evolutionary potential of fundamental rights. In this sense, she is committed to deepening her research into new rights and reinterpretations of existing rights to meet pressing social and environmental challenges.

Luísa participates in the activities of the International Society for Public Law – ICON-S , as a member of the Community and Engagement Committee , through which she develops pro bono activities aimed at promoting inclusivity and diversity in academia.
 

Conceptualizing Ecocide Project

“The question of ecocide is not just a legal or political problem, but it is also a problem of the imagination. What kinds of stories need to be told, what kinds of justice are we seeking, and what are the spaces (legal, political, cultural) where such justice can happen?” Dr. Susanne Knittel

Conceptualizing ecocide calls for an approach that cuts across academic disciplines. This project brings together researchers from across the university and stakeholders and organizations beyond the university, whose work touches on any aspect of the problem of ecocide and its legal, ecological, scientific, political, sociocultural, criminological, philosophical, and historical dimensions.

Since the 1970s, the possibility of internationally criminalizing ecocide has been widely discussed, for example as a war crime, a form of genocide, a crime against humanity, or a fifth international core crime. However, there are numerous challenges, both theoretical and pragmatic, associated with any such criminalization, and with the concept of ecocide in itself. While ecocide has yet to be recognized officially as an international crime, it is firmly established in the public vocabulary for discussing the unfolding environmental crises with severe ecological consequences such as large-scale pollution, rapidly disappearing rainforests, and the mass extinction of species.

The concept of “ecocide”, including its legal manifestation, implies a form of intentionality (recklessness) and culpability. At the same time, the kind of violence that ecocide denotes is often diffuse and delayed, thereby challenging established notions of cause and effect, agency, and responsibility. Furthermore, these environmental harms cut across national and international boundaries, which raises problems of jurisdiction and standing. They also cut across conceptual boundaries, such as those between nature and society, human and non-human, foreign and domestic.

These challenges have contributed to the difficulty of defining ecocide as a crime within existing juridical frameworks and institutions, such as the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Ecocide raises fundamental questions regarding the way we think about guilt, liability and the duty of care. How do we determine who is responsible and how do we hold them to account? How do we acknowledge human and non-human victims? What is the power of a legal concept such as ecocide? And how do we, or should we, balance ecological and socio-economic considerations?

In addition to the theoretical and legal challenges, ecocide also presents a fundamental representational challenge: how do we make visible and understandable to a broader public what ecocide is? What role can the cultural arena play and how can artists, writers, and filmmakers raise public awareness about ecocide? Conceptualizing ecocide calls for an approach that cuts across academic disciplines. The aim of this project is to bring together researchers from across the university and stakeholders and organizations beyond the university, whose work touches on any aspect of the problem of ecocide and its legal, ecological, scientific, political, sociocultural, criminological, philosophical, and historical dimensions.
 

Practical Information
Date and time: Monday 29 April, 16.00 PM - 17.30 PM
Room: Alex Brenninkmeijerzaal
Building: Johanna Hudiggebouw
Address: Achter Sint Pieter 200, Utrecht University