Faculty Spotlight: Rebuilding Societies

When countries have moments of civil unrest, Lindsay Harroff, Ph.D., studies how communities respond and rebuild.

Harroff, an assistant professor in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts & Letters, studies truth and reconciliation commissions, government-sanctioned bodies that investigate periods or patterns of violence.

With her current research project, Harroff aims to understand how these truth commissions can help rebuild communities during and after periods of violence. Ultimately, this “requires us to reimagine the national community,” she said.

Harroff attended Furman University in South Carolina, and earned a bachelor’s degree in both communication studies and political science. It was during a class that she discovered the truth and reconciliation commission established by Chilean government following the 1973 to 1990 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

“As a student of rhetoric, it was interesting to study the precarious situation of the Chilean president apologizing for the abusive acts his predecessor committed while explaining the findings presented in the commission’s report. Moreover, I was struck by the challenge of setting this violent history as the foundation for promoting national unity,” she said. “That moment highlights the weight of rhetoric in shaping how countries move forward.”

The summer before her final year as an undergraduate, Harroff participated in a National Science Foundation research experience program where she studied the parliamentary debates following the 2007/2008 post-election violence in Kenya.

“I didn’t know then I’d become so enamored by truth commissions, but I knew what motivated me was the transformative potential of language,” Harroff said. “This experience helped me come into my identity as a rhetorical scholar and to know that I wanted to pursue the questions I was interested in.”

She continued her studies in communication as a doctoral student at the University of Kansas. Her research project focused on how truth commissions promote community and help societies rebuild, she said.

“To say that we are only citizens of a nation doesn’t emphasize or tell us anything about each other as a community, and ultimately, we lose those relational ties that help us relate and connect to one another,” she said.

Harroff followed the public truth and reconciliation commission from the post-election violence in Kenya, in South Africa after apartheid, as well as an attempt at a truth and reconciliation commission in the United States. She also plans to turn that research into a book now that she’s a new assistant professor at FAU.

“The truth and reconciliation commissions in Kenya and South Africa may have done some good, but understanding them as cure-all solutions actually misses much of their potential and ignores issues that still need to be addressed to foster national unity and create a more just society,” she said.

If the U.S. or any other country wants to follow Kenya’s or South Africa’s truth commission to reconcile the national community and to reconcile with the past, Harroff said, they need to look more critically at the lessons learned — some, by what has yet to be accomplished — and commit themselves to real transformation to better communities, she said.