by Eliza Garnsey and Caitlin Hamilton
At its heart, Creating Justice: Conversations on Art and Human Rights is more than a book – it’s a dialogue. Across its pages, artists and scholars from around the world come together to share their experiences, reflections, and stories about the ways art can confront injustice, amplify marginalised voices, and imagine new possibilities.
For us, this book represents years of collaboration, friendship, and mutual admiration. It’s a project that unfolded amid life’s inevitable twists and turns – pandemics, parenthood, professional transitions – all of which shaped its journey. What began as an exciting idea to create a book of conversations grew into something far more meaningful: a global community united by a shared commitment to justice through art.
A Global Community in Conversation
Each chapter of Creating Justice is an actual conversation – raw, real, and unscripted. These exchanges took place across phone lines and internet connections, bringing together contributors from Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Greece, India, Italy, Iraqi Kurdistan, Mexico, Palestine, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. The format itself reflects one of the book’s core beliefs: that knowledge is best shared collaboratively, across borders, disciplines, and experiences.
When we began, we didn’t have a fixed blueprint. Instead, we reached out to artists and scholars whose work had inspired us and shaped our understanding of how art and human rights intersect. From there, the project grew organically. Some participants referred others, and soon we found ourselves immersed in an extraordinary network of voices, each offering unique insights into the power of art to bear witness to harm, foster empowerment, and drive change.
Art as a Lens for Justice
The contributors to Creating Justice address some of the most pressing questions of our time: How can art reveal new dimensions of human rights violations? What role does creativity play in healing and recovery after conflict? How can art challenge systems of oppression and build bridges between people? These aren’t questions with simple answers. What emerges instead are deeply personal, richly layered reflections that highlight the diverse ways art intersects with justice.
Each chapter focuses on a different artistic medium – performance, painting, installation, and more – though many contributors work across disciplines. We struggled with how to organise the chapters: Should we group them by medium, geography, or theme? In the end, we settled on an arrangement that felt truest to the stories being told, one that creates a narrative flow for those reading cover to cover while still allowing readers to dip in and out as they please.
Beyond Traditional Boundaries
While the book is informed by our academic backgrounds, we deliberately stepped outside conventional scholarly norms. If we’d stayed within the usual disciplinary lines, the introduction might have offered a theoretical overview of art’s role in political discourse or its capacity to bear witness to trauma. But we wanted the conversations to take centre stage.
For us, this approach was about more than style – it was about values. We believe that the knowledge shared by artists and scholars deserves equal footing, and we wanted the book to reflect that. By focusing on dialogue, Creating Justice challenges traditional hierarchies of knowledge and invites readers to think differently about what it means to ‘know’ politics and how we engage with it.
An Invitation to Join the Conversation
Above all, we hope this book sparks more conversations – between artists and scholars, readers and creators, and all who care about justice. To us, Creating Justice isn’t about filling a gap in the literature or ticking an academic box. It’s about a shared belief that art matters deeply in the fight for human rights.
The stories within the book’s pages have moved us, challenged us, and inspired us in ways we could never have imagined when we first began this project. They represent not just a collection of ideas, but a testament to the power of creativity to confront oppression, inspire connection, and imagine new possibilities.
As we see it, this is only the beginning. The conversations in Creating Justice are a foundation for what comes next: new voices, new ideas, and new ways of seeing the world. We invite you to join us on this journey – because there is so much more to be said, and so many more stories to tell.
About the authors:
Eliza Garnsey is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in International Relations at the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London. Her research focuses on art and visual culture in international relations and world politics, particularly in relation to human rights, transitional justice, and conflict. Eliza’s monograph, The Justice of Visual Art: Creative State-Building in Times of Political Transition (2020), demonstrates that there are aesthetic and creative ways to pursue transitional justice. Her recent book, Justicecraft: Imagining Justice in Times of Conflict (2024), is co-authored with Lauren Balasco, Arnaud Kurze and Christopher K. Lamont.
Caitlin Hamilton is a writer, researcher, and editor. Her research interests include the intersection of popular culture and world politics, creative methods, and feminist approaches to peace and security. Her recent publications include The Everyday Artefacts of World Politics (2022) and the third volume of Gender Matters in Global Politics (2023, co-edited with Laura J. Shepherd). She is also the founder of Hamilton Editorial and Hamilton Compass which offer editing and coaching services for academic professionals.
Keywords
Human rights, art, politics, conflict, post-conflict, justice, artists, violations, healing.
Photo by María Fuentes on Unsplash
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