Lia Kent is a peace and conflict studies scholar with a long-term research focus on Timor-Leste. My work has engaged with questions of social memory, transitional justice, and the social and political lives of the dead. I am especially interested in what emerges from the productive intersections between dominant international discourses of peacebuilding, performances of state sovereignty, and everyday practices of rebuilding communities in the aftermath of mass violence. My current project examines local social and political practices around ‘the missing’ of conflict in Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste. Through ethnographic research I am exploring how the indeterminacies that imbue missing bodies can provoke diverse responses (from intimate rituals to public protests) that can both drive and unsettle attempts to settle their meanings and identities. The project aims to open a space for thinking about new kinds of international responses to the missing that go beyond dominant forensic science and transitional justice models and take local modes of knowledge production seriously.
Lia’s current publications include:
The Unruly Dead, Spirits, Memory and State Formation in Timor-Leste (University of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming, 2024). In this book I draw on long-term ethnographic research in Timor-Leste to explore what it might mean to take the dead seriously as political actors in state formation. Chapters focus on how different categories of those who died ‘bad’ (violent or untimely) deaths during the Indonesian occupation are activating forms of memory-work that bring them back into relationships with the living, unsettling the state-building logics that seek to contain and control them or render them ungrievable UW Press: The Unruly Dead (wisc.edu)
‘The Dead as Memory Workers’, Memory Studies (forthcoming 2024.) In this article, part of a special issue on the theme of memory, activism and the arts in Asia and the Pacific, I explore how Timor-Leste’s dead are memory workers in the way that they work on the living, opening up reparative and political possibilities. I explore how the work of the dead troubles the distinctions between the active and the passive, the subject and object, and the human and the more-than-human that lie at the heart of dominant understandings of memory-work and memory activism, inviting new ways of thinking about agency and the unexpected avenues through which social and political change can sometimes take place.
Kent, Lia. 2024. “The dead as agents of truth-telling: lessons from Timor-Leste and the Indigenous Repatriation Movement.” Journal of Sociology (forthcoming, 2024). This co-authored article with Steve Hemming, Daryle Rigney and Cressida Fforde, is part of a special issue on decolonising truth globally. It brings the experience of Timor-Leste into conversation with the international and Australian indigenous repatriation movement, which has been working to return the bodily remains of those taken to museums during colonial times. We argue that truth-telling requires, in the context of indigenous harms, an expansion of the form, scope and subjects of truth-telling. In particular, it needs to become a holistic and relational practice that does not disconnect the living from what is designated the dead, the truth-teller from the listener, the human from the more-than-human, or the past from the future.