Over the past decade, a growing number of scholars in the social sciences and the humanities have come to approach political violence as an environmental phenomenon, and conceptualize environmental injustices as violence (e.g. Barca, 2014; Buell, 2017; Gray and Sheikh, 2018; Lee, 2016; Nixon, 2011; Sharpe, 2016). Concurrently, material (including visual) cultural practitioners and theorists grappling with violence have mobilized the testimony of environments (e.g. flora, fauna, landforms, atmospheres, buildings, landscapes and cityscapes) to enhance the sensorial and epistemic valence of their work. This themed issue takes its cue from such mobilizations but also proposes to reconsider them in light of a series of fundamental questions that remain underexplored in this context of violence’s ‘environmentality’ (Agrawal, 2005) even as they have become increasingly complexified by it. These are fundamental questions because they concern the political claims and promises attached to testimony and its various registers such as documentational, figurative, forensic and artistic. We therefore ask: What are the political possibilities and limitations of enlisting environments as authoritative witnesses to violence? What might the sensorial multiplicity associated with testifying to violence environmentally entail for both the primacy of the visual and its critique as a Eurocentrism? How do the truths produced through such testimony bear upon the various politically pragmatic ends it is expected to serve, such as verification, adjudication, resubjectivation, reparation and reconciliation? Contributors to this issue, who work across visual cultures, media studies, architecture and human geography, and who were first brought together in an interdisciplinary symposium held in early 2019 at the London School of Economics and Political Science, explore these questions via a diverse range of contexts including Pakistan, Georgia, Colombia, Austria, Sri Lanka and Lebanon.

中文翻译：

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主题问题介绍：环境暴力作证：了解、感知、政治化

在过去十年中，越来越多的社会科学和人文学科学者开始将政治暴力视为一种环境现象，并将环境不公正概念化为暴力（例如 Barca，2014；Buell，2017；Gray 和 Sheikh，2018；李，2016；尼克松，2011；夏普，2016）。同时，与暴力作斗争的物质（包括视觉）文化从业者和理论家已经动员了环境（例如植物群、动物群、地貌、大气、建筑、景观和城市景观）的见证，以提高他们工作的感官和认知效价。这一主题问题从此类动员中汲取灵感，但也建议根据在暴力“环境”的背景下仍未得到充分探索的一系列基本问题重新考虑它们（Agrawal，2005），即使它们变得越来越复杂。这些是基本问题，因为它们涉及证词及其各种登记册（如文献、比喻、法医和艺术）的政治主张和承诺。因此，我们要问：将环境作为暴力的权威见证人的政治可能性和局限性是什么？与环境暴力相关的感官多样性对于视觉的首要地位及其作为欧洲中心主义的批评可能意味着什么？通过这样的证词产生的真相如何影响其预期服务的各种政治实用目的，例如核实、裁决、重新主体化、赔偿与和解？这个问题的贡献者，他们在视觉文化、媒体研究、