Relational approaches have become increasingly prominent in the social sciences and humanities, resulting in the so-called ‘relational turn’ (Dépelteau 2013). Rather than focusing on isolated actors or events, such approaches seek to understand phenomena through their relations: between people, practices, institutions, histories, and systems of power. But what does it mean to work relationally in research? The project Dialogics of Justice operationalizes a relational approach in bringing various cases of historical injustice in a relation to one another. In this study seminar, Lily Abichahine, Nicole Immler, Siri Driessen, and Bram van Boxtel shared their experiences on relationality as an analytical and methodological orientation, with particular attention to the challenges caused by relating the experiences of highly different groups of people and institutional players to each other.  

We invited Lily Abichahine, a lawyer, artist and UvH phd-candidate, who provided a performance lecture that performs relationality regarding historical injustice and provides input in questions to discuss such as: How can connections between distinct yet entangled cases be made visible without flattening differences or producing false equivalences? What does a relational perspective enable us to see, and where does it raise new conceptual, ethical, or political questions? 

The seminar brought together different ways of thinking and experimenting with relationality and serves as an exploratory space for collective reflection. 

It also functioned as a preparatory moment for the final conference of Dialogics of Justice 15-17 April at the UvH, where we will exercise the relationality between all our cases we studied.

Photos by Nicole Immler