Jessica’s Auchter’s research started with ghosts, specifically thinking through what it may mean to be haunted, by those lives and deaths that are so often part and parcel of a scholarly interest in international studies. Fundamentally a scholar of visual culture and politics, she is interested in how subjects such as death and the missing are visually represented or rendered invisible. She has written widely on human remains and their politics.She is also interested in the role of professional witnesses, those whose work it is to translate atrocity or human rights violations for wider audiences, such as journalists, humanitarian workers, and researchers, and the pressures and dynamics of such translation.
Jessica’s publications include:
Auchter, Jessica. 2021. Global Corpse Politics: The Obscenity Taboo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. My recent book focuses on how the obscenity norm is used to regulate images of dead bodies in global politics, particularly in the context of the war-on-terror. Obscenity matters precisely because it is applied inconsistently across multiple cases. Examining empirical cases including ISIS beheadings, the death of Muammar Qaddafi, Syrian torture victims, and the fake death images of Osama bin Laden, this book offers a rich theoretical explanation of the process by which the taboo surrounding dead body images is transgressed and upheld, through mechanisms including trigger warnings and media framings. It questions the notion that the key debate at play in visual politics related to the dead body image is whether to display or not to display, and instead narrates various degrees of visibility, invisibility, and hyper-visibility.
Auchter, Jessica. 2018. “Displaying Dead Bodies: Bones and Human Biomatter Post-Genocide.” Human Remains and Violence, 4(1): 41-55. In much of my research about dead bodies, I continually came across the memorial imperative to display bodies as evidence of atrocity, as we see in cases such as the Rwandan genocide. Yet it seemed that the role of bones and human biomatter in genocide memorialization is a bit more complex than it was often depicted. This article is an attempt to reckon with this and examine some of the ethical and political questions raised.
Auchter, Jessica. 2013. “Border Monuments: Memory, Counter-Memory, and (B)ordering Practices Along the U.S.-Mexico Border.” Review of International Studies 39(2): 291-311. This article looks at memorial practices of migrants who have died crossing the border. Often the memorialization of migrants traverses the frontiers between the missing and the dead, and questions of identification and burial are complicated and fraught. I am always intrigued by the work individual artists are engaged in to think through these political questions, which is one of the key contributions of this article.