DrVanessa Barolsky

Vanessa Barolsky works across several disciplinary areas including sociology,
anthropology, criminology and transitional justice to tackle questions related
to social conflict and its transformation. She is currently investigating
these questions through research that critically interrogates the relationship
between truth-telling, decoloniality and reconciliation. She is the co-editor
of a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Sociology on 'Decolonising
truth globally'. Her engagement with truth-telling in Australia is informed by
her work at the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) where
she was one of the authors of the Commission's final report on human rights
violations under apartheid. Her PHD on the South African TRC analysed the
discursive construction of knowledge about political violence at the
Commission.
Prior to her employment at ADI, Vanessa Barolsky was a Research Specialist at
the Democracy, Governance and Service Delivery Programme of the Human Sciences
Research Council in South Africa where she led numerous interdisciplinary
studies on key social challenges such as access to justice, violent crime and
safety policy, including a major international study in South Africa and
Brazil on the role of social cohesion in preventing violence in developing
world contexts. In 2016 Dr Barolsky was awarded the Bellagio Academic
Residency fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Oppenheimer
Memorial Trust Award for Sabbatical Study for her work on social cohesion. She
completed a six-month honorary fellowship at the Centre for Global Studies,
RMIT University in 2017.