 Okay, welcome again to those of you who are able to join us here live on zoom for this presentation. My name is Joey left strand I'm a postdoctoral fellow at so as University of London and today's webinar on linguistics is from Dr Nancy Hucker who's also at so as University of London. She's a senior teaching fellow was previously also postdoctoral fellow at Oxford where we overlapped briefly actually dancing so I've seen you present a seminar at Oxford before. So now I get to see you present here or both at so as so Nancy will be sharing some of her social linguistic research on dialects of Arabic in a particular context. So we look forward to hearing from research you've been doing for a while and it's going to be published soon so it's great to get a sneak preview of what you've been working on. So let Nancy hand it over to you and let you get started. After about 30 or 40 minutes when Nancy is done we'll open it up for questions for whoever has questions to ask. Thank you so much Joe for inviting me and for organizing this I really appreciate that you're doing this extra work for the department in the school. I just like to say if you have any technical issues with how I'm presenting that you can't hear something. Please speak up because I might not be able to see the chat though of course Joe is here so he'll help out. And I welcome questions please do post questions all the time and you know obviously I'll have a look at the end but I just love the interaction so so just keep questioning everything. Now I'm going to start sharing my presentation I do have a few slides to show you and also some of the recordings I made. So it might be interesting for people who don't know Arabic, but I think there are also some larger questions about women's voices and about genres of speaking in general too. So I've called this the biased leading the biased so it's to do with unconscious bias with regards to how people speak to people's voices. And I'm reporting on the results in particular of a survey I did on how people react to testimonies of violence against women, given in Arabic. So I'll tell you all my problems with that made me start this project about three years and three or four years ago when I applied for the funding. Of course not all my problems in my life but just these problems that I have and I'll be asking everybody for solutions to these problems. So, one of the first questions I had was what is it about a stretch of speech. So you have speech like in a conversation, but there's a specific kind of speech that we call a testimony. So how do we define a testimony so that was the first question I went into this research with. Obviously it is reported speech it is something. It's it's in the first person it's somebody testifying about an event but why why do we call it a testimony, other than in the legal sense. Then, a women's testimonies in particular, and especially Arab women's testimonies, how are they received by the audience. What kind of reactions can we expect and obviously I had the hypothesis that certain testimonies are devalued, and women's testimonies tend to be devalued and Arab women's testimonies might come at an intersection of social categories, which is particularly devalued. There is a prejudice, if my hypothesis is right and there is a prejudice against receiving these testimonies. If it is unconscious, how to locate unconscious bias and can it be done through a sociolinguistic analysis. So, I'll just pause here and wait for your answers to these questions now. I'll tell you how I went about to, about investigating this. So first of all, there's the literature and I'm really relying here on Professor Deborah Cameron who's done work on sexism in language and feminism in language, and indeed all kinds of gender issues around commenting on language or how language is used. So, we can see from this slide that there's just a massive amount of publications on the market, especially in English, about how women ought to talk in order to be taken seriously. And this leads to all kinds of, there's a TED talk and Arab women in particular have a niche within this kind of industry of giving advice to women. This is, I'm talking about this lean in advice, this stop apologizing advice. You know, politicians are told to politicians or women are told to speak in a certain way, for instance, less high pitched voices, etc., so that they sound a little bit more like men basically, and are taken more seriously on that basis. And Arab women have inherited another kind of complex, as well as this one is to do with being oppressed as Arab women in a patriarchal culture which is seen as specifically Arab rather than kind of the general patriarchy everywhere. So Arab women or Muslim women are kind of seen as an audience which needs to be let's say rescued and I'm really using this in kind of scare quotes by let's say the women's rights advocates. And so you have these kinds of this advice for Arab women's careers and so on. We can also see from this that there's a certain class element. This is a specific kind of in the context of the neoliberal capitalism and how basically the respect for women is measured by their success in their careers in the public speech speaking. So this is really where I started from as a kind of criticism of this and then there is that flip side that women who do experience violence frequently come from socioeconomic circles which have nothing to do with this. They are not at all about to prepare for their TED talk, these are women usually on the margins of society, so of course domestic violence against women does happen everywhere. So what I will argue on the basis of the evidence I collected is that there is testimony and there's prejudice, let's say, possibly against women's testimony, but for that to change and the preceding change would have to be structural change, that the reason why these women are not taken seriously is more to do with structures that might be legal, they might be socioeconomic, they might be to do with how families are run policies with regards to running families or indeed the states. So a symbolic attribution of kind of leaning in or doing or not apologizing, those are symbolic changes, but they can only come really after structural change. However, this kind of awareness raising about women's voices can have some kind of value in changing that structure. So that's my big argument, let's say in the framing of this talk. Now where did I get my evidence? So I was, first of all, this is part of a larger project, and it was to do with how testimonies are translated from the point where they are collected, let's say in a field interview with a witness, and from there how they are processed through a mediatalization until they are published in some form, and an audience can receive it. So I was studying that kind of causal chain of translations from the point where you'd say the witness provides the testimony until the audience hears it. And one of the organizations that I was looking at in particular was Amnesty International who published this report in 2015 called Assaulted and Accused, and it's about violence, or gender based violence in Tunisia. So that's where I took the testimonies that I'm going to use, and that's also the organization where I studied these processes of translation to do with the research on human rights testimonies. And the kind of diagram I came up with to visualize this journey of the testimony, it looks a little bit like this. So on the top left you have the first, let's say, stage of the creation of a testimony whereby there's an encounter in the field. So in the case of this, in this report it was Tunisia, different towns and villages in Tunisia, and the researcher does an interview with a witness. That researcher takes, and that interview will be typically in a dialect of, well in this case Arabic, so it's in a spoken language, so spoken vernacular language. The researcher takes field notes, and that will be in a combination of languages that the researcher is comfortable in because the researcher is under pressure to finish the field work and to produce something for the organization. So they have to type it up for their closest colleagues on secure digital files, which becomes the archive of the human rights research, and that will then be either in a standard written Arabic typed Arabic, or in English. Already we have several layers of translation between stages one and three of the creation of the testimony. So then there's a publication, and in the publication the testimony gets included in the framework of a human rights report so it becomes kind of edited for that purpose. So typically that that report at Amnesty International at least is written in English. It goes through reviews, expert reviews in the organization until there's a text that's approved including the testimony which is marked by quotation marks, and then it is translated by professional translators so here we have another stage of translation which is translation not editing. It can be translated from the English into standard Arabic. So that's not the language in which it was given originally it was given in spoken Arabic, let's say, or maybe Berber or maybe, maybe another language. But now it is in modern standard Arabic which is the kind of official language that the translators are trained to produce. And then it is disseminated and once it's disseminated the audiences received the testimony. My question was, how do the audiences see that connection that now quite meandering connection back to the witness can they see through that highly processed text and and and recognize that link back to the witness who gave the testimony in the first place. And is that a genre that's kind of produced through language kind of discursively produced. So that was the question the whole point of the research was to examine that top link in with a question mark. And I did publish a little bit about that internal translation process within the organization in an article in 2018. And now we're going to go into a little bit of what this particular experiment was so the next section does involve engaging with testimonies of violence against women if some people have particular particular reasons to be sensitive to this other than of course it is upsetting. Then, then possibly you'd want to mute this and come back in five minutes. So yes, I'll let you listen to the recordings I made so what I what happened was I was, I had this report published by amnesty in modern standard Arabic. And there was no longer any record of what the testimony had looked like when it was actually given in the field that's that's not recorded, except for those notes that are taken in the notebooks. So I asked actors to recreate how they would have given the testimony if they were, if they were kind of recreating that event in the field. So there's one in Palestinian Arabic one in Tunisian Arabic one in standard Arabic. It was also recorded to in English in different accents of English so that people can get a sense of what it is that I was testing these different ways of speaking authentically in the field. He slashed my stomach in my cheek. I still have a scar on my stomach. I went to the hospital. He slashed my stomach in my cheek. I still have a scar on my stomach. I went to report him at the police station and went to the hospital to get stitches. I brought the medical certificate and photos of my injuries with me and had to go to two police stations before I was able to give my statement. He was never detained. So that was the translation of that one in English. This is the... So there was a modern standard Arabic version, the version as it was published by Ammesty. I used to be a police officer and a police officer without a job. I used to work as a police officer. One of the guys came up to me and said, what's your problem? What do you want? It was a Palestinian urban dialect by an actor. I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt and my head was shaved at the time. A guy came up to me. He didn't like my looks. He said, what's up with you? Are you a guy? Do you like girls? He was sitting in his car and drinking a bottle of beer. He got out and beat me with it. So you get an idea that what I'm trying to test is unconscious bias against different ways of speaking. I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt on my head and shaved at the time. I'm not here. These are the texts of the testimonies as published by Ammesty International. Then there was the text. I had several groups, some in Arabic. The focus groups had the disadvantage that I was there to moderate the focus groups. They all had to listen to these testimonies and I asked them, what did you think? Nobody was willing in front of me and you see how I am obviously in favour of taking women seriously. Nobody was willing to say anything more negative about these testimonies than, what are we supposed to do about this problem? That was the most negative response I had in the focus groups. There were a lot of interesting remarks about metalinguistic remarks and remarks about what could be done, but none of the remarks were hostile or oppositional. Yet I know that some people really don't like to hear about violence against women and really shut it down. I had a problem that the focus groups were very interesting, but they did not find any negative responses. That's when I devised this survey and the Leave a Human Trust financed it. I had to recruit all these people to help me produce this research and I really do want to thank everybody. The survey had several bits. The opening bit is to ask people to consent to warn them that this is upsetting and they can only participate if they were over 18. Then they were immediately confronted with this recording of an act of testimony in a variety of Arabic. There were 150 participants. It was organised through a private survey hosting company, Qualtrics. There were 50 participants in Kuwait, 50 participants in Palestine and 50 participants in Tunisia. They all got to hear randomly selected either a testimony in Palestinian Arabic or a testimony in Tunisian or a testimony in modern standard Arabic. This is to show that even when the testimony was in a dialect, people seemed to more or less understand it. People had to then react to say how much of it did they feel they understood. This is of course self-reporting so it's not completely accurate. It didn't test people's understanding of it. But even the person, there was one person who marked that he was a Palestinian respondent, a male. He had heard the Tunisian testimony and that's with a big difference in the varieties. That person who reported that they understood 10% and then in one of the comment boxes gave quite a good account of what the testimony was about. Yes, it's a woman who's wearing shorts and she's in the street and somebody attacks her. Even that person who said they understood only 10% had quite a good understanding it seemed of the general gist of what the testimony was. The first thing to test statistically is to see whether men and women responded differently to the testimonies. So 101 of the respondents were women, 47 men to prefer not to say. And when I did a statistical study to compare just those two factors, you can see that here they had these reactions. And I've listed it basically from the least, the reactions were least favored towards the reactions that were most favored. We see that most people were both, you know, were annoyed or upset by this testimony because it was unfair. And at the top we have this, it's made up and so on. So there is no difference between men and women in these reactions. There's no statistically significant difference. There's only one that comes close to a statistical significance, which is what I've heard makes me angry. So expressing anger was more available to the male respondents than to the women respondents. But apart from that, nothing. And for that you'd have to test on a bigger group. Basically the number of respondents was too small for that to be, for me to draw any conclusions. So these were the kinds of after they heard the testimony they had to put on a Likert scale between zero and 100 where they stood on any of these reactions. So it varies between solidarity, sympathy, hostility, dismissal and apathy. So that's what I was measuring. And then the other question was what did the younger respondents respond differently from the older. You know, again, there was absolutely no statistical difference. So it means that possibly those feminists in the 70s who did the campaigns for women's rights, maybe they are still around and maybe they did their job well. Because it's not as if there's a new modern trend to take women more seriously. It's the same over the generation. Now with regards to testimonies, one is about marital violence and the other one is about a street attacked on a woman who positions herself in a gender nonconformist way. So I was wondering whether the respondents were more sympathetic to the heteronormative one over the LGBTQ one. And again, there was absolutely no difference between the two. Along that axis, so people were equally sympathetic or angry or apathetic to both. Now with regards to the dialect and as a modern standard Arabic, and this is where this is where the headline news is. Definitely one of the arguments I can put forward is that people when there was a match between the dialect of the person receiving the testimony and the dialect of the person saying the testimony, then they were had much stronger emotional reactions of solidarity and sympathy. So when there is not a match, when the, for instance, a Palestinian survey respondent hears a Tunisian testimony, then there's much less sympathy and solidarity. The interesting one for me is where there is possibly not a high effect but not a significant effect with regards to the modern standard Arabic. So you can see, when there is a match between the audience and the witness, it's in purple. When there is not a match in the dialect of the audience and the witness, then it's in yellow. And when it's modern standard Arabic, ie it should be equally accessible to all Arabs, then that's in blue. So if you look at I am angry because the woman is sharing the story with people who shouldn't hear it. I mean, you know, she's putting out the dirty laundry, then that's to do with people who heard it in modern standard Arabic. So modern standard Arabic seems to be this kind of window to the outside. If you're saying your testimony in modern standard Arabic, it means you are kind of broadcasting it to the people who, you know, this should be really kept in a house. You're broadcasting it to the outside. With regards to telling the truth, much higher. If it's in the same dialect as the receiver, that's high, but it's not significant. Very, very angry, very angry at this injustice, at this violence against the woman when it is somebody who speaks the same dialect as the audience. So that that becomes very significant. And it's anger at the injustice against the women, which is a sign of solidarity. So that's the headline news really this is what the survey brought in terms of its results. Now, another aspect of the survey is that people are very strong views. I'm just going to let you look at this and tell me what it is so when the slider you can see the blue line is where the respondents placed their slide. Their response so you've got 100, it's between 100 and zero right so if it's if the slider is towards the left then it's zero if the sliders towards the right it's 100. So as you can see, for instance, if you look at, I think the woman is telling the truth, the person who heard the LGBTQ testimony says yeah 100% she's telling the truth. And then the other response pattern for the marital violence is zero no she's absolutely not telling the truth. But then, so we know that these people are very strong views but it maybe doesn't, you know what they're saying is it's not because she's speaking Arabic, right so they for that, the third question in red. The second to last, it's easy to sympathize with her because she's speaking Arabic no no I am angry or have these strong views about what she said but it's not to do with her being an Arab. This is kind of on principle. But the point is that here people had really strong views and that's, it's quite rare in a commercial survey to have such strong views about 33%, a third of the respondents had very strong views on what they had heard so it is emotional even in this highly mediated way that people were just sitting down to do this to do this exercise a survey is still reacted very strongly to the testimonies. Right, then there's this kind of people putting the slider in the middle. And that's usually what people do that's kind of the expected result of surveys. And that's to do with how commercial surveys are used and overused and of course we, you know, we know before you leave this website will you tell us our views or that's just the results in this kind of So satisfying is what people just do enough to get to the end of the survey. And so then that's basically they do they give it just the amount of energy that they need to to get by right it's still a reaction but it's it's not an strong reaction. However, people also volunteered to put in comments in the comment boxes. There were four comment boxes and 75% of respondents left at least two comments in the comment boxes they didn't have to, but they were moved by what they'd heard to do that. Only a few of them were no comment. A lot of it was, I'm heartbroken. This is so terrible. How could the police behave like this. And we need to do something about it and so on. The call tricks had told me don't put four comment boxes it's too much people don't have the mental energy to write that many comments, but then, you know, in effect people, yeah, just kind of went against that. Then I I recorded I was looking for those negative reactions so I was noticed that with people making negative reactions really blame it on the way the witness speaks so there's notable hesitation in the voice of the girl fake story that was the Palestinian Palestinian actor unconvincing testimony and then a reaction to the modern standard Arabic one, whoever is telling the story is not an Arab but an Orientalist the story seems unrealistic. Why does a foreigner speak in Arabic. Then the story is painful. I see the point of the content but it's not realistic the way it's recorded, which is possible. That's fair point. After all it is mediated. I believe the young woman is trying to present a false report that was another one, not convinced despite trying. There's a logical problem with the testimony and so on. So I don't like the story. I think it is fabricated. It is so boring. I think it is possibly not even fake. I think this girl is lying and deceiving everyone. So these were some of the reactions. Most of the reactions as I said were positive, but I chose to kind of look in a bit more depth to the negative ones. Now there are negative reactions online so obviously state publishes not only about violence against women but one of the big ones was the incarceration of this was also a report in 2016 I think in Syria and of course prisoners across the world and vast majority are men so I don't want to come across as I was only focusing on on the women but the vast yeah obviously so there's also a gendered aspect to incarceration. And here the amnesty presented this testimony as a kind of in this form which is was a kind of composite testimony said from the point of view of this of this fictional man and presented in this kind of animation. But it was a way of presenting yeah it was a way of presenting a testimony in the first person. And here though these sarcastic reaction touching video. I can't wait to see how that will help the the Islamists amnesty has no evidence so they used this ridiculous cartoon and then somebody's trying to defend amnesty and then it goes on no cartoon is not evidence of this happening either this is a fake story. No cartoon character was harmed in the making of this fake news to that even the witness they hanged live to tell the tale so this is. Again a mental linguistic commentary on the way the testimony is presented and what they they're questioning here is the use of the cartoon as being fake basically and they're also using of course real witnesses who survived. And you know became refugees so this is an interview that amnesty did and provided to world media and here the person is speaking in Syrian dialect and speaking about what they saw and in the back they can see their face to protect their identity. But it is enough authenticity and this this was widely picked up in the media where the cartoon wasn't here it's just the. I think it's the Daily Mirror republished that and finally you know comments that this is real life accounts of detainees who are unaware that they're about to be executed well yes there were real life accounts of detainees but this was not it this was a cartoon and this was an animation. This was a real one and then. All of these methods of collecting data had their limitations and so obviously I'm bringing it together and to kind of study how the genre is media ties. And how the legitimacy of the testimony kind of survives almost a mediation. Problem with me was obviously I was focusing on the negative reactions because those were the ones I had no access to and I wanted to understand so really I'm here with an anthropologist or linguistic anthropologist mind. Using a survey method which is really only yields results that are then statistical which are not the same as what an anthropological investigation can give. So for me even though I have to say yes majority of people sympathetic for some reason I keep tending to show those negative reactions. So this was an example of the trolls reaction this was the person who did not disclose their gender and was the only person who said I believe that police behaved in a very reasonable way in you know. This missing the woman who had been attacked. So special about testimony so here I'm answering the first question which is that what is a testimony. Yeah so there are definitions in the literature a lot of literature has to do with big historical events of course here I'm looking at kind of more intimate events but they are. It's a kind of suffering on such a scale that could be seen as collective. And it seems that there's something special about testimony that it has to be of an importance that is greater than the individual case so in a sense that the individual is presenting their own authentic authenticity but their legitimacy is derived from the importance of the events that they are witness to. So this is why the the added value of an organization like Amnesty International or other organizations or indeed you know academic presentations and you know in this in this sort of linguistics in the linguistic seminar is an added values and added megaphone let's say to that individual who was speaking because because there's this idea that the importance is so is dictated by the context. Arabic is a good one to test to test unconscious bias because authenticity comes with this way of speaking Arabic is a genuine spoken variety. But authority is another element of legitimacy comes from the modern standard Arabic which is associated with presenting the news and serious matters and political discourse and even campaigning discourse so. Translating it into modern standard Arabic is a way of of redressing testimonial injustice so instead of speaking in that undervalued spoken variety we're now giving it the added value of modern standard Arabic but there's a tension because then it loses authenticity right so what do we want more as part of the legitimacy authority or authenticity so that's why it was interesting especially to do it in Arabic. And how to be received with legitimacy well so so linguists can have their own opinion about this and here I am and I'd say oh yes you can just stand up and lean in and stop apologizing and give all these imperatives wear glasses to a PowerPoint presentation. Be sarcastic. And then, you know, and this is not at all what the so so linguists will have want to do they have a different ethical imperative which is to give value to diversity of voices. Now to come clean and I have worked for Amnesty International so when I make this commentary on the way they do that work of collecting testimonies I am also commenting on my own past work. And on my colleagues and colleagues so you can take my conclusions with a pinch of salt knowing that about myself. And so here I come I conclude with my arguments so the big argument is that all research is both symbolic and practical and can contribute to structural change which is where the real change needs to happen before testimonial injustice can be redressed. The medium sized argument in between is to say yes a testimony should be treated as a special genre of language is not so much authored, but the legitimacy is co created, indeed through these mediatizations so rather than say oh you know these these mediatizations distort the original authentic language from from the witness, we can say no well what it's aiming for is to be a legitimate form of speech and that that legitimacy is co created, including with all these levels of translation. My smallest argument which is supported by the results of the survey is that yes people are more likely to react with respect and sympathy to a witness who speaks like them that is the that is the news. But if they are predisposed to react with apathy dismiss or even hostility they will use the witnesses voices, whatever they are as evidence against them. So in a sense, if you're trying to convince those people who are against testimonies, then it doesn't actually really matter that much which voice you are presenting, but there might be other reasons to present a whole diversity of voices in this field. And these are the references I especially draw attention to Deborah Cameron's work which is on the gender respect gap so analyzing how women's speech is is received by audiences. And one that's very interesting is article Hashemi who did this work on language ideology and how people who speak specific varieties of Arabic in a mushroom that's the Levant kind of the East Mediterranean. So look down upon people who speak at the Maghreb dialects. That's great thank you so much Nancy for the presentation all that data and information she was like to to think about and discuss we actually already have one question in the chat from Compton Zulu. If you'd like to ask your own question come to feel free to unmute yourself and turn your camera on if you'd like to ask your question. Otherwise I'm happy to read it out on your behalf and says already written out in the chat. I can read the question. Thank you. So because you mentioned the cartoon I'm assuming there are barriers to obtaining physical evidence of violence against women or injustice in general. How can such barriers be overcome. Great thank you so a kind of campaigning question. Yeah, I mean this is a challenge. I think a lot of it can be discursive in fact if people. So speaking from a point of view of like not, not these big organizations or people who are dedicated in fact to finding finding the human rights violations and documenting them. So that's one thing obviously the people whose job that is. The issue is this practices of daily life of maybe appreciating and and respecting different voices. It can be done both as a political project like these campaigning organizations do but it can also be a way of valuing every day conversations definitely the social linguists would go with that in terms of maybe, you know, since the tradition of maybe dialectologist in the 19th century, you know that the Macedonian swine herd marches along with Homer, when it comes to the value of the way they speak that's one of the quotes from the early dialectologists. So, kind of respect for every way of speaking, I guess kind of reduces the barriers for people then speaking up. Right so that's when the structural change could happen. If the barriers are lower with regards to the respect of people on the margins. Is there also a practical issue of respecting privacy and protecting witnesses in the amnesty international case as a reason why they don't have original recordings that they can share and distribute. Okay, yes, so that. Okay, so if we're talking about amnesty in particular and how they do their research. Some of the researchers do record audio of the conversations they have, and they can't publish it it is purely for amnesty archive which kind of serves as a counter archive to official government discourse of no everything's fine of course we look after our, you know, people. The amnesty archive where all these things are deposited and on the one hand yes so you wouldn't want to disclose people's voices and identities without their consent. But also, it is just too much work, you know you are looking at researchers who are, let's say, in a hospital interviewing any woman who's willing to come forward. Maybe a queue forming once they hear that there's a human rights researcher there and then they only have only have permission from the authorities to be there for two hours. They, they will try and record as many cases as possible, but they won't have the capacity to then transcribe it, re listen to everything. Do all that analysis that we as academics, you know, would prefer to do what they have to have is a human rights case, they don't need to have that specific testimony. So they already go through that evidence with a filter, and that filter will be that it has to be accurate, it has to correspond to the facts of the case, but they will select those facts that are relevant to creating a human rights case and that is also. To respect what the witnesses expect of amnesty. So the witnesses will come forward to amnesty knowing these are the experts that they will make the case strongly that there is a human rights violation and they are giving their testimony with that expectation. And that sense of co creation yes it is a from one point of view, it is a distortion, but from another point of view it is a necessary filter and that's why I'd like to look at testimony that co created rather than an authored genre. That's what I'm suggesting. Thanks. If there's another question, otherwise I have more questions I can continue to ask but does anyone else have a question. Thank you sorry I'm on the funny machine. Thank you that that was really, really nice really interesting lots of lots of stuff in there. But one question I think it follows a little bit from what Joe was asking is, I think, I think, you know, and in a sense it's entirely sensible to ask what is the testimony and try to find one way of defining it. I was listening to I was wondering whether whether there's something, you know, something more instrumental about it something more political about it so so I think it would almost help me for for the cases you talked about, to have a much more narrow definition or much more context sensitive definition if you like of testimony, because it like like you just said it serves a particular purpose. So, so the, you know, the, the little diagram you have of this genesis of the text and the reception and the production. You know, there is an element of this, this wants to do something this is a text genre which, you know, every text wants to do something but here's, in a sense, intuitively at least quite obvious whether that that's true it's not a matter of, but, but, but to be as a starting but to be naive about it. I think if she, if she, if she thinks that this goes to Western audiences. This is then meant to, you know, maybe raise a fundraising campaign, maybe raise awareness in general of women's rights or raise awareness of, you know, with different religious communities. And if you address, like, you know, Tunisian audience, that's slightly different because you think maybe there is, you know, there is political change people should be doing. So, so I would imagine that's that's in, you know, whether conscious or subconsciously, but that really informs the process. And that that's also what defines the testimony. So there is a case to be made, and I do accept totally a case to be made that there's a specific type of testimony which is the human rights testimony. And then we can't generalize from that to to testimony in general. So most of the work on testimony has been done. There isn't that much but it when it has been done, it's on Holocaust survivors. And so there there is a different kind of moral imperative to collecting the testimony which is a historical lesson. This must not be repeated. At least at least these voices could be preserved, as opposed to all the millions who were exterminated. So there's, and there I suspect the demand for authenticity would be a little bit different to the to the human rights testimony. But there is still a process I would argue of co-creation. The model itself would not not be invalid. And that there's a there's an expectation because testimony is always presented as I form so it's I and there's this quotation marks which make it very strongly the idea that it comes out of the mouth of the witness that that then makes people expect Oh, but but then it's wrong. If it's not the actual words that actually came out of that actual person's mouth, then it's a lie, which is I'm arguing quite, I guess in a roundabout way to say there's no point in having that argument. We're not saying this is a lie. It's a co-creator testimony. And that is what testimonies just are because they have a historical importance that's greater than that individual. So, yeah, I'm, I can see that there might be different types of testimony, but I think scheme in general what I'm arguing for might still apply in other cases. And I also take the sense that, yeah, of course it's different when you are using amnesty's report to lobby in the UN and then that you're using amnesty's report to lobby the Tunisian government which of course amnesty does and and you know, possibly that would be another way of researching it and kind of looking at those specific interactions then when they sit with the Tunisian government of Tunisian government. I was very happy to pay lip service apparently I interviewed the researchers to oh yes we look after the women yes yes yes oh we're doing so much to look after the women just don't mention don't mention LGBTQ and don't mention the sex workers that was. Yeah, so even though amnesty had kind of strategically used the gender based violence as a way to also talk about LGBTQ and about sex workers conditions, and and trafficking of women, then the government also use that bluff against them to say oh yeah yeah we'll talk to you about this, but we'll only talk about the women. They're not the other, the married women there, you know, they're the ones that are easiest to talk about. If there's not another question I'd like to ask a bit more about the statistics, but I'll give a moment just in case anybody else has questions. So first on the survey results I mean it is worth noting that it's nice to see that there weren't a lot of obvious biases along you know age and gender that people are willing to recognize you know these testimonies call for empathy with the victims and you see that in the majority cases so that's that's kind of a positive result I guess that's assuming that there's no biases but at least you know you're in majority saying like what might be the correct response to these testimonies. But then you do point out so there is some kind of bias on the dialect basis or variety of Arabic everyone categories that. I'm wondering how can you separate saying that this this bias along which variety of Arabic testimony and is based on social linguistic identity versus comprehension. Because you could say you know I'm I'm less likely to be empathetic. So I'm going to see this is a different person and I'm going to use that as the pretense for saying I don't believe them versus I'm less likely to be empathetic and this is hard to understand so I'm not going to invest the time and not going to believe them is it possible to tease that out like whether there's a difference between the comprehension aspect versus the sort of social linguistic identity aspect of this. Yeah, I'm not absolutely right that it's then quite hard to see how much they understood what I'd say is that then you have the the modern standard Arabic is a control. If it were the content. And so the comprehension of modern standard Arabic in Tunisia Palestine and Kuwait is roughly the same level. I mean there are minority groups so. So for Berbers in Tunisia which are small minority Arabic would be a second language and then modern standard Arabic a third language so possibly there the comprehension would have been an issue. But as a kind of education systems, they, yeah, they aim for 100% comprehension. Yeah, no absolutely that's a good, it's a good point it could be simply that the person got the full picture and then they empathized more. What I didn't want to do in the survey presenting the survey results and what will maybe stop me from testing what you're asking me. I said I didn't want to compare the three nationalities against each other because I didn't want to kind of rate them you know I didn't want to say oh Tunisians are the ones who are most sympathetic. And the end and Kuwaitis don't understand what women's rights are I didn't want to do that because it's just a 50 respondent sample it's not demographically representative. It's very vastly over generalizing so I, that's why I kind of compressed them into is it a match or is it not a match or is it modern standard Arabic so that then covers all, all three groups in terms of geographical distribution. And, and so possibly I'd say this would have to then be redesigned. Just one group. What I'd say is this that in the focus groups. The differentiation was completely different it wasn't according to. Oh, I'm sympathetic there was one person said why I have to love the Palestinian woman because she's a Palestinian and I'm Palestinian, but in general, it was this is unjust and it really really annoys me. There wasn't, there wasn't even any, what we get in England when I did the kind of pilot test here was a lot of, I've heard this so many times before a lot of fatigue, you know a lot of fatigue about getting upset about testimonies. I'm not part of the fragility of the genre. But when I did it in palace and with with the Palestinians and Tunisians and the other focus groups. There was no fatigue. And they really engaged with it and then there was only kind of towards the end of the discussion yeah but what am I supposed to do with this this is just too much and, and then there'd be one in each focus group there was one person who bravely. This was regardless of gender with a man or woman or whichever way they presented to come in really engage with how both their emotional reaction their rational reaction, and a kind of account of what they could do for themselves and develop after hearing these testimonies so the reaction really seemed to be to do with emotion of the injustice. Yeah. But I don't think I could use my survey results to test the comprehension thing. So from saying that the comments that were made we're really, you know if there is a bias it would be unconscious because the people were just making so many comments about oh what happened to this woman can you know what, could you tell us more, it's, you know, thank you for giving the, you know, giving us this chance to talk about it. So a good example of what we sort of know in general that the message depends a lot on the past experience of the hero and how they respond really depends on you know what what they've gone through what they've heard before. And I guess probably a challenge for international organization like Amsterdam International where you know you're trying to put out a message that you can just spread everywhere but it's going to land differently on different audiences and can have different reactions. And also what looks said I mean to pick up on organizations issue is that they have a part in this fatigue right they have also maybe underestimated what a testimony is and not treated it as this fragile legitimacy that it is. So actually the commodification aspect of you know fundraising on the back of testimonies just makes a lot of people very cynical about it. Right. And so it's instead of using it as a, as a legitimate amplification of a voice. It's like a commodity that is used for marketing purposes, even though of course these organizations need funding amnesty in particular is not funded by any grants it's not to do it you know it is funded by membership membership fees so yeah they do have to do fundraising somehow, but, but the testimony maybe the fragility of that legitimacy has been underestimated and that's that's what I would say. I think it's a quick time for one more question if somebody has a question they want to to end with this and say someone's been waiting for that perfect question you wanted to ask be in touch so I'll put my, my says NH 57 at so as. Some people think of a question, you know, or in my case I think of a question 60 seconds laughter that everything is over. So, but yeah be happy to hear about it I am, you know, I'm definitely open to more feedback on what were the problems with the survey. I do keep thinking about that as I'm writing it up so yeah, I'd be happy to hear from everybody. Well thank you so much Nancy for sharing thanks to everyone for coming today, and I hope this was the valuable use of your time and found something you could take away with for your own work as well. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming.