6 - Researching Justice: Justice as Accountability and Justice as Collaboration

Summary

How do academics know what justice means? You need to ask. And sometimes, you need to experience injustice. This is probably my main takeaway from a few decades of researching state crime. I come to this from my own lived experience, as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. I know this has always fueled me and my work. My father's parents were Jewish refugees from Budapest, and my mother's parents were Jewish refugees from Vienna. While this meant that we had excellent cake growing up, it also meant that there were many absences, silences and griefs. What to do when graves exist on the other side of the world, or there are no graves, just names of those taken. When close family members are murdered. When they experience isolation and discrimination in their new country. This is not unique to me or my family, or the Jewish community. But I do know that it is the reason I do what I do. I also know that because the state crime of the Holocaust has been acknowledged, and made visible, this makes a difference. There are many state crimes, past and ongoing, which have not been. Like many people, justice, and injustice, has always had an immediacy to me. How justice can be understood, and achieved, and its different meanings and shapes, is something I carry with me, and that shapes and is central to my research and work practices.

I grew up bordering the bush of Garigal country of the Eora Nation in Sydney. I now live and work on Wurundjeri land in Naarm/ Melbourne, and did my PhD on Nunnawor land in Canberra. The importance of the land on which I grew up, and the land I live and work on now, have become more evident to me in recent years. Growing up though, and through much of my earlier academic life, it was the land of East- Central Europe, that land my family had been forced to leave, and that was and continues to be a site of injustice, that was my centre. This is starting to shift.