Choreographies of Repair: Defining Justice through Psychosocial Accompaniment in Post-Conflict Guatemala

Abstract

This thesis brings together transitional justice frameworks with feminist geopolitics to explore the spaces of justice and repair created through psychosocial accompaniment and its related processes with women survivors of sexual violence in post-conflict Guatemala. It attends to the bodies, practices, discourses, and every-day spaces that work together to constitute this accompaniment and its impact. The spaces and openings for repair and justice are possible because of the way that psychosocial frameworks incorporate feminist epistemologies in order to situate present and past violence along a continuum of colonial and patriarchal violence, work towards survivor-centered and defined justice, and at times articulate critiques of court-based justice. Through these orientations, new survivor and accompanier subjectivities emerge, emotionality and affect circulate and are harnessed towards collaboratively envisioned social transformation, and the body is imagined a site of both trauma, truth, and healing.