Poetry of Witness Project

Between October 2024 and April 2025, Dr. Choman Hardi collaborated with Dr. Rachel Kerr on the research project Visual and Embodied Methodologies (VEM) for Imaging Intersectional Gendered Violence, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Their work centred on testimonies from survivors of the Bosnian genocide, with a particular focus on the accounts of wartime sexual violence. Through this collaboration, the researchers explored how poetry might offer a different kind of truth, one that conveys the emotional and embodied dimensions of trauma often lost in formal documentation. From this process emerged The Bosnian Sequence, a cycle of nine poems by Dr. Hardi that give voice to pain, endurance, and the quiet reclamation of joy. The poems stand as acts of witness and transformation, inviting readers to engage not only with the history of violence but also with the resilience that follows it.