March 11, 2011

Kimberly Larkin, Davidson's 2011 Smith Scholar

by Kelly Beggs

Like any good future lawyer, the ethical representation of others is a priority for Kimberly Larkin '11. She's spent her academic career at Davidson analyzing how Westerners portray non-Western cultures in the international legal arena. Now, as the winner of Davidson College's 2011 Smith Scholarship, Larkin will continue her studies in Belgium at Université Libre de Bruxelles focusing on "Law, Ethics and Public Memory."

Established by Tom Smith, a 1948 alumnus from Greenville, S.C., the W. Thomas Smith Scholarship at Davidson is awarded annually to one exceptional senior at Davidson who demonstrates outstanding academic achievement, leadership, and a commitment to community service. The award provides for study at a major university outside of the United States.

Larkin hopes to one day litigate in the International Criminal Court, so studying in a very internationally integrated country will give her valuable experience. She said, "Davidson has opened so many doors, and I'm really grateful for that. Brussels is the hub of European legal and political integration, and this experience will enrich and enable me to ask the kind of questions that need to be asked."

Larkin fashioned a major in Davidson's Center for Interdisciplinary Studies to accommodate her interests in history, literature and the law. Her research has involved using historical and literary lenses to analyze legal texts, and has taken her from Northern Ireland to East Africa.

She said, "I've been interested in law for a long time, but I didn't understand that you could pull legal texts apart and deconstruct them and put them back together and use them as a window into society."

After her first year at Davidson she did summer research on post-conflict literature in Northern Ireland. That trip helped her understand that some parts of society remain conspicuously absent from the texts that follow a cultural clash.

While working in Northern Ireland, Larkin interviewed Bishop Edward Daly, one of the heroes of the peace process in that country.

She had intended to interview Northern Irish authors and academics, but as a viola player she met some compelling characters while fiddling in local pubs. "Sometimes I was playing with people who were ex-paramilitary members," she said. "They were really interesting, but their stories didn't show up in the literature."

She began to question the ethics of representation of members of other cultures, and she became curious about what gets lost in translation.

She then became interested in the "Gacaca" courts established in African nation of Rwanda in response to the 1994 genocide there. She decided to write her thesis for the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies about the response to the Gacaca system by Western legal non-governmental organizations (NGO).

"The Gacaca courts are a very hybrid, unprecedented justice system," Larkin explained. "Westerners have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that this doesn't fit within our Western box of what law should look like after genocide." For example, there are no roles for legal professionals in the Gacaca judicial process. Instead, community members are in charge.

Curious about what the NGO reports on Gacaca courts did not include, Larkin traveled to Rwanda to talk to genocidaires -- those found guilty by Gacaca courts. She spent two weeks in Northern Uganda and one month in Rwanda observing Gacaca courts and interviewing genocidaires in Kigali Central Prison who'd received life sentences. She is fluent in French but discovered that most of her subjects were mostly comfortable speaking Kinyarwandan, so she found a translator.

She said, "I never thought about the fact that my translator's history was connected to the genocide as well. But I found out that he was Tutsi, and lost most of his family in the genocide."

She recalled an interview in which a genocidaire claimed the genocide was "a war, not a genocide." Her translator got so upset that the ensuing verbal conflict almost escalated into a physical one. She recalled, "My translator was a well-educated man who had been calmly describing and translating all of these atrocities. But he finally couldn't take it any more. There's so much unresolved and unwritten history in this country that people don't talk about because they're not allowed to anymore."

As part of her research in Rwanda, Larkin interviewed convicted genocidaires and observed conditions at "Tigiste" prison camps, where gacaca courts send genocidaires to serve their sentences.

Larkin explained that the genocide clause in the post-conflict Rwandan constitution prohibits people from identifying others by race. Even saying the words "Hutu" and "Tutsi" is an illegal act. Though she believes that Rwanda's recovery is a success story in many ways, she added, "If the two sides don't start discussing those stories equitably and ethically, you're going to end up creating another cause for conflict."

The Smith Scholarship will allow Larkin to study the public memory of Rwanda from a Belgian context. She will work as a research assistant in the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Brussels, where the museum is redesigning exhibits on The Congo, Burundi and Rwanda for the first time since the three nations declared independence from Belgium in the mid-20th century.

"Considering the significant and very tragic role that Belgium has had in those three nations, it's important that they're doing this," she said. She will collaborate with a team of Burundi, Rwandan, Congolese, and Belgian scholars and curators to redesign the content of the museum's permanent exhibition, working to tell the intertwined stories of the countries equitably and ethically.

Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,900 students located 20 minutes north of Charlotte in Davidson, N.C. Since its establishment in 1837 by Presbyterians, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently regarded as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. Through The Davidson Trust, the college became the first liberal arts institution in the nation to replace loans with grants in all financial aid packages, giving all students the opportunity to graduate debt-free. Davidson competes in NCAA athletics at the Division I level, and a longstanding Honor Code is central to student life at the college.
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