Tessa Boeykens

I am an engaged historian inspired by multiple disciplines and qualitative methods. Through ethnographic fieldwork and participatory video, I explore the production and mobilization of historical narratives in ‘post-conflict’ Guatemala. More specifically, I focus on the relation between narrativity and political action in indigenous victim-survivor communities in the Cobán region of the Alta Verapaz Department. I work with people in different challenging context: 1) with Poqomchi' and Q'eqchi' victim-survivors claiming reparations and reburying their disappeared family members and 2) with a community of returnees resisting the construction of a hydroelectric dam on its territory. During my PhD trajectory, I gradually developed a participative, filmmaking-based methodology to explore the making of shared history and collective resistance against hydroelectric projects. In May 2018, together with Maarten Hendriks and Julie Schiltz, we co-founded the international Participatory Video Festival (PVF), to explore the possibilities and value of participatory video for social sciences. I am also one of the founders of ENCUENTRO, bringing together people with an interest in Latin American cultures, economies, politics and histories in their many aspects and from a critical perspective. I am also a member of the interdisciplinary research forum TAPAS/Thinking About the PASt and an associated research fellow at the Human Rights Centre at Ghent University.