Can nonhumans — animals, rivers, etc. — bear witness? How does the ability to testify — to speak (up) for yourself — shape communities? Who gets to be heard?
(Cameron Etherton & Eve Judah)
In an age of polycrisis — marked by environmental collapse, information overload, AI and deepfakes — testimony has emerged as a key ethical question for the 21st century, as it is more necessary than ever to find new ways of listening to and acknowledging our world and those within it.
Scholars from across Europe and the United States gathered in Oxford on 17–18 June to confront these questions at Witnessing the World Otherwise: Testimony, Community, and the (Post-)Human. This international conference was co-organised by LMH DPhil student, Cameron Etherton (2024, DPhil Medieval and Modern Languages), and Eve Judah (2023, PhD Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics), from LMH’s Sister College in Cambridge, Newnham.
The idea for the workshop came from Cameron and Eve’s overlapping research interests. Cameron’s DPhil, funded by the Oxford-LMH Walker Graduate Scholarship, centres on witnessing in the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida and focuses especially on its relation to issues of fictionality, survival, and the nonhuman, while Eve explores how collaborative institutional contexts shape philosophical activity. Her thesis offers the first full-length study of 'La Philosophie en effet', an experimental book series launched by a collective of philosophers, including Derrida..
“Our initial desire to organise a workshop came from working together on a seminar series and realising how related our main research interests were,” Cameron and Eve said. “The workshop’s particular focus came from a mutual desire to think through the philosopher Sarah Kofman’s provocative demand, in her testimonial work Smothered Words (1987), for a ‘new “humanism”’ following the Holocaust.”
The starting point was a simple question: what happens when we tell other people what we have experienced
Testimony can help people understand one another and create a sense of shared experience. As Cameron puts it, “by testifying to my condition and experience, by addressing myself to others, I am recognised and can become a member of a community,” what Marie-Eve Morin, a Canadian scholar of phenomenology, has described as a “community of witnesses”.
But the workshop also explored how testimony is not always straightforward.
Much traditional thinking about testimony assumes that a witness is a person who can say “I was there” and describe what happened to them. Cameron’s research looks at what happens when experiences are so difficult or extreme that they challenge a person’s ability to put them into words, an issue that became particularly important for philosophers writing about the Holocaust and its aftermath.
That led Cameron and Eve to push the question further. Does witnessing always require a human voice, or can animals, landscapes or the natural world also bear traces of what has happened?
“By focusing on the ‘post-’ of humanism, we desired to reflect on whether these thinkers provide resources for considering what it might mean for animals or nature to testify,” Cameron said, “and whether, consequently, there is scope to include these nonhuman others within a thinking of community.”
They sought to consider whether Sarah Kofman’s call for a “new ‘humanism’” after the Holocaust, and humanist thought in general, still has something to offer in discussions about animals and the environment.
The event brought together twelve speakers, from graduate students to established academics, based across the United States, France, Hungary, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom.
Professor Ian James of the University of Cambridge gave a keynote lecture, ‘Biocommunity — A Preliminary Outline’, while Professor Peggy Kamuf of the University of Southern California led a roundtable on Derrida’s Témoigner: Séminaire (1992–1993), published by Seuil in 2025, which she is currently translating.
Speakers discussed topics including the poetry of Francis Ponge, the philosophy of Sarah Kofman, artificial intelligence and Chilean cinema. Dr Kevin Inston, Senior Lecturer in French at University College London, also discussed his recently published book where he develops a theory of community that is separate from property, The Politics of Belonging: Towards a Theory of Improper Community (Edinburgh University Press, 2026).
The event gave Cameron and Eve the opportunity to take questions at the centre of their research and explore them with researchers approaching testimony, community and the nonhuman world from very different perspectives and a multitude of fields.
The event was supported by LMH’s Davis Visiting Speaker Fund, the Society for French Studies, TORCH (The Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities) and All Souls College, and was held at the Maison Française d’Oxford.
“LMH’s Davis Visiting Speaker Fund was in particular invaluable for ensuring that we were in a position to cover our invited speaker’s travel costs,” Cameron said.
