Zahira Aragüete-Toribio

Zahira Aragüete-Toribio is a Senior Researcher in the project “Right to Truth, Truth(s) through Rights. Mass Crimes Impunity and Transitional Justice” led by Professor Sévane Garibian at the Law Department of the University of Geneva and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. She holds an MA in Anthropology and Cultural Politics and a PhD in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London. From 2009 to 2013, she worked as a research assistant under the supervision of Dr. Sari Wastell (Goldsmiths, University of London) in the project “Bosnian Bones, Spanish Ghosts: Transitional Justice and the Legal Shaping of Memory after Two Modern Conflicts” funded by the European Research Council (ERC Starting Grant). From 2013 to 2016, she taught as an associate lecturer in anthropology of rights, anthropology and history, anthropology and gender theory, and introduction to social anthropology in the Anthropology Department of the same university. She was a research collaborator of the project “Subtierro: Exhumaciones de fosas comunes y derechos humanos en perspectiva histórica, transnacional y comparada” led by Dr. Francisco Ferrándiz (Spanish National Research Council) from 2016 to 2019. From 2020 to 2023, she is also a member of the project “Más allá del subtierro: Del giro forense a la necropolítica en las exhumations de fosas comunes de la Guerra Civil (NECROPOL)” led by Dr. Queralt Solé (University of Barcelona) and funded by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation. Since 2021, she co-manages the European network “TRACTS: Traces as Research Agenda for Climate Change, Technology Studies, and Social Justice” funded by a research and innovation grant of the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) organization.
Her doctoral research explored scientific, historical and social endeavours in connection to the exhumation of human remains from the Spanish Civil War and the postwar period in the southwestern region of Extremadura (Spain). Focusing on notions of evidence production, she studied the role that human remains, documents, war remnants, oral accounts and expertise played in the construction of new histories and sociopolitical claims about past political repression. For her postdoctoral work, she has continued to focus on the legal, political and scientific treatment of human remains in the production of truth, evidence and knowledge after conflict and the sociocultural legacies of mass crimes in contexts of impunity.

 

Main publications:

Books:

• Producing History in Spanish Civil War Exhumations. From the Archive to the Grave, Palsgrave Macmillan. (Fecha prevista de publicación 2017)

Articles and chapters of books :

• “Confronting a History of Loss in a Spanish Family Archive”, History and Anthropology, vol. 28, n° 2, 2017, pp. 211-234.
• “Negotiating Identity: Reburial and Commemoration of the Civil War Dead in Southwestern Spain”, Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol.1, n° 2, 2015, pp. 5-20.
• “Traces of the Past: Working with Archaeology as Ethnographic Object”, Goldsmiths Anthropology Research Papers (GARP), n° 18, 2013, pp. 1-14.
• “Objetos personales: exhumaciones, memoria y antropología visual”, in Beatriz Nates Cruz, María García Alonso, Carlos Vladimir Zambrano and Fabián Sanabria eds., Memoria y Territorio, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá (co-autor Jorge Moreno Andrés).