Testimonies of the Self and Others: Sara Jones and Emilie Pine in Dialogue

In this chapter, Sara Jones and Emilie Pine present a staged dialogue centred on their experience of cross-sector projects incorporating witness testimony. The starting point for the dialogue is the project Testimony in Practice – and its major outcome, the play A Land Full of Heroes – which the authors worked on with the Romanian and German novelist Carmen-Francesca Banciu and the theatre company La Conquesta del pol sud. Jones and Pine interweave accounts of their own lives with discussion of the ethics of working with witnesses to trauma and violence, the risk of instrumentalising others, the dialogical nature of research “impact”, the possibility of combining an academic career with the realities of being a human (woman), and feminist resistance to neoliberalisation of Higher Education.