Rendering Trauma Audible with María del Rosario Acosta López

What would it mean to do justice to testimonies of traumatic experience? That is, how can experiences which do not fit the customary scripts of sense-making be heard? Whereas processes of official memorialization or legal redress often demand that victims and survivors convey their experiences through familiar modes of narration, María del Rosario Acosta López's project on “grammars of listening” asks how it might be possible to hear these experiences on their own terms and what are the challenges that we encounter when trying to do so. She argues that doing justice to trauma requires a profound philosophical questioning of the conditions that allow us to listen to testimony, and a true reckoning of the responsibility that we bear as listeners.  

María del Rosario Acosta López is a professor at the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California Riverside where she is also a co-operating faculty member of the philosophy department. Her teaching and research is in areas around romanticism and German idealism, aesthetics, contemporary political European philosophy and more recently questions of decolonial and Latin American studies with an emphasis on questions of memory and trauma in the Americas.