DANIELLE TRANQUILLE
Sitting in the conference hall on the second day of the ATEA Conference at the University of Western Australia in Perth, I kept wondering if academics could bring about the kind of change our education systems so urgently need in our classrooms in Australia and elsewhere in the world. Or was there a divide that siloed teacher training from actual teaching practice? I belong to both worlds and could see neither the gap being bridged nor the willingness sometimes to chart new paths forward from both sides. Then came the keynote address from Dr. Siona O’Connell of the University of Pretoria, a scholar in African Studies whose research centres on memory and restorative justice. Her talk invited something rare in academic settings: a moment of personal reflection from educators, one that transcended theory. It called for a response grounded not in abstraction, but in lived experience—in being, in memory, in becoming.
Hers was a voice from another place, yet it resonated deeply in the Australian context. She reminded the audience that memory is, above all, an act of shared humanity—and that justice, to be meaningful, must be restorative: for all peoples, across all times, and within every nation. Her words shifted the atmosphere in the room. Soft murmurs followed, pens began to scribble, fingers moved quickly across laptop keys. It felt like a genuine moment of stillness and reckoning—perhaps even, a moment of self-awareness rooted in critical reflexivity, one much needed before any institutional or academic change can take place.
What follows is an overview of the interview that Dr. O’Connell generously agreed to, where she spoke candidly about her personal experiences and how they have shaped her work and identity as an educator.
Memory, Justice, and Refusal to keep silent
Fiercely personal and unapologetically political, Dr. Siona O’Connell’s work on memory and restorative justice occupies the space between academic inquiry and embodied resistance. But ask her who she is, and her response resists the usual biographical frame.
“I feel like an interloper in academia,” she says. “I struggle, as many of us do, to be truly ‘seen’ through the lens of credentials. I am the daughter of dispossession, the product of a colonial past, shaped by silences and absences”. While she speaks with the precision of a scholar, she lives with “urgency constantly negotiating memory, belonging and justice”. She further contends, “My voice is not separate from my work, it is embedded in every frame, every citation, and every interview. I do not claim objectivity – I claim presence. I am always drawing from a deeply personal reservoir of memory and resistance.”
First and foremost, O’Connell explains that her work is inextricably linked to her story, whether writing or directing documentary films, her presence is always embedded. She insists on claiming her position as a witness, a daughter of struggle, a scholar shaped by the legacy she critiques. “My voice is not separate from my work,” she says. “It’s in every frame, every citation, every interview.” Her documentary films in particular serve as acts of remembrance and refusal “to forget, to look away, to be complicit.”
Giving Voice Is an Act of Justice
O’Connell maintains that the past is not history gone by as the legacies of colonialism, land theft, and cultural erasure are not behind us. In fact, they shape the foundations of today’s institutions and inequalities. For her, engaging the past is not optional; it’s essential to understanding the roots of contemporary injustice. “Bringing back the past is not about nostalgia,” she further asserts. “It is a form of resistance. It’s about reclaiming stories, bodies, and knowledge systems that were denied space.”
That is why O’Connell is particularly committed to reclaiming stories, bodies, and knowledge systems of those who have been silenced by displacement, marginalisation, forced migration or simply erased by dominant systemic inequalities and injustices. But she is quick to clarify. “Giving space for voice is not an act of charity; it is an act of justice. It affirms the dignity and knowledge of those who have been systematically silenced. In a world that still profits from displacement, whether through gentrification, forced migration, or cultural erasure, making space for the voices of the oppressed is about accountability and justice. It ensures that we are not only telling history but changing it.”
Without the retelling of the past, our reading of the present remains superficial, and our hopes for the future unfounded. “The past is not over,” she declares. “It is the prologue to our present. Unless we read it carefully, we cannot write a different future.” Cover 
Reflecting on South Africa’s past, O’Connell warns against the myth that time alone brings justice. Material inequality, spatial segregation, and psychic trauma remain. The official end of apartheid, she notes, did not dissolve its residues. For her, reconciliation without justice is hollow. Memorialisation without structural change is performance. Globally, this is a cautionary tale, especially in our present times: forgetting is not healing. It is, often, a form of erasure. She propounds rather, “The key lesson is that injustice does not disappear with time, it mutates. Apartheid may have ended legally, but its material and psychic residues remain. The global lesson is that forgetting is dangerous. We must learn that reconciliation without justice is hollow, that memorials without structural change are performative. Across all her work—academic, artistic, activist—O’Connell returns to a core ethic: “My call remains the same regardless of what I do: remember, resist and rebuild.
When asked what she would say to the younger generations of South Africans, who often feel overwhelmed by inherited crises, O’Connell offers a message of affirmation and challenge., calling upon their agency to make the changes happen. “To Gen Z: You are not too young, too late, or too disconnected,” she says. “You are already changing the terms of the conversation.” She encourages them instead to use their platforms not only to be seen, but to “make the unseen visible”.
Conclusion
This first part of Dr Dr. Siona O’Connell’s interview presents her voice, one of moral clarity and intellectual depth. But above all, it portrays an academic whose voice is irretrievably rooted in experience—deeply personal, profoundly political, and unafraid to ask the hardest questions. For her, memory is not an archival artefact to be displayed as a commodity on ‘official’ occasions but it is a living tool, that of those whose voice has too often been silenced. For her, justice is not an idea, it is a demand in the face of marginalisation entrenched in systemic inequality and injustice.
In an age of quick snapshots, hers is a voice that calls for the past to inform the present in order to reclaim a future built on acts of resistance against what has been and too often still is. Where there is silence let there be a voice, is her motto. Hers is definitely one that resonates far and wide!
The second part of the interview to be published in Forum will raise questions about the place of the academic and activist she is in the field of education, teacher education and the place of the academic in general in society today.
Biography 
Professor Siona O’Connell (PhD), based at the University of Pretoria, is a scholar in African Studies with a primary research focus on Memory Studies and Restorative Justice in the South African context. She is working on the first children’s book to be published in Nama, an endangered indigenous language of South Africa. Dr O’Connell has directed and produced twelve documentary films of which, Heritage: Uitgesmyt! which recounts the story of the coloured community in Elandskloof, Cederberg in Western Cape, South Africa. They were forcibly displaced because of the Groups Areas act of 1950. She is the co-editor of Hanging on the Wire, Photographs by Sophia Klaase, a volume that received the 2018 National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) Award for Best Non-Fiction Edited Book. She was a Fellow in the Trilateral Reconnections Project at Brown University and an alumnus of the Brown University International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARI). She held the position of Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University (USA) during 2018–2019, and from 2021 to 2025, she serves as Visiting Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark. In addition, Professor O’Connell currently chairs the Humanities Standing Committee of the Academy of Science of South Africa.
