RICHARD LATHAM LECHOWICK
Academic | Aid-worker | Speaker
EVENTS
Late Night Live - 'The Power of Collective Memory'
Interview with David Marr, ABC Radio
LISTEN NOW: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/latenightlive/geopolitics-memory-power/105754362
Description: Collective memory is storytelling on a massive scale. Every nation, every community, has a master narrative—the ‘official’ story about who they are, who they aren’t, what has happened to them, and why it all matters. As Dr Lechowick states, 'If you control the memory, you control the narrative; if you control the narrative, you control the power.'
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Global History Lab’s Narrative Observatories: Rapid Response History in Action
Talks & Workshop
Convenor: Dr. Richard Latham Lechowick
Co-Convenor: Prof. Jeremy Adelman
Description: The Global History Lab’s half-day event introduces the Narrative Observatories in action. Grounded in bottom-up, globally scaled social science (BUGSSS), the Observatories bring researchers together to document, analyse, and compare narratives from diverse contexts, making visible how storytelling influences social cohesion, public memory, and political life.
The event will showcase ongoing research while also inviting participants to take part in a live, interactive Observatory session. In doing so, the event demonstrates narrative as both a form of knowledge and a research method: a way of understanding fracture, and a way of building connection across difference.
The first part of the programme features short presentations from convenors and current Observers. Prof. Jeremy Adelman, founder of the Global History Lab, will situate the Observatory model within broader debates on story, society, and knowledge production. Dr Rick Lechowick, co-designer of the Observatories programme, will introduce the Narrative Observatories framework and reflect on its development and evolution to date. This will be followed by case studies from two current Observers collecting narratives in their home countries.
The second half of the event is participatory. Guided by the convenors, participants will engage in a facilitated exercise that mirrors the opening phase of a Narrative Observatory by collectively identifying emergent narratives shaping contemporary social life.
By combining presentation with practice, the event embodies CRASSH’s 25th-anniversary theme, Knowledge in a Fractured World, and invites participants to join a shared experiment in understanding how stories fracture, connect, and remake the worlds we inhabit.
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I Won't Let Them Be Like Me
5 Questions to the Author
Description: In this interview with CRASSH, Rick Latham Lechowick discusses his book, ‘I Won’t Let Them Be Like Me’: Ezidi Women’s Agency and Identity after the Sinjar Genocide. Drawing on his work with women in Khanke displacement camp in northern Iraq, he explores how they describe their changing lives, challenge established gender roles, and imagine futures for themselves and their children.
Quotations:
'What both interested and surprised me initially me was the fact that no one had ever focused on women’s experiences ever. Additionally, no modern ethnographic work has focused on Shingalis (Ezidis from Sinjar), the largest Ezidi community in the world.' - Dr. Lechowick
'Readers are also moved by the unexpected strength and hope shown by women who survived captivity or lost family members. There is far more hope in the camps than one might imagine. If despair would seem rational anywhere, it would be here. And yet, I never met anyone who had entirely given up hope.' - Dr. Lechowick
https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/blog/i-wont-let-them-be-like-me-5-questions-to-rick-latham-lechowick/
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***Book Launch***
Narratives of Gender after Genocide
Talk, Wine, & Discussion
Description: Join us at the University of Cambridge for a discussion of Richard Latham Lechowick’s new book, I Won’t Let Them Be Like Me: Ezidi Women’s Agency and Identity after the Sinjar Genocide.
This book explores how Ezidi women in northern Iraq articulate agency, identity, and gender roles through the stories they tell about their lives. Drawing on four years of ethnographic fieldwork during and after the genocide, Dr Lechowick foregrounds the perspectives of women living in Khanke IDP Camp as they navigate displacement, negotiate shifting social expectations, and quietly alter the boundaries of what is permitted, possible, or thinkable within the orthoprax Ezidi society.
These narratives reveal forms of agency that move beyond the defiance/compliance dichotomy, embracing the grey zones where ambiguity and contradiction coexist. They speak to the everyday negotiations of power and belonging, shaped by the enduring collective memory of a people in exile, and they reveal how women draw strategically on their subaltern position to access new forms of agency.
Through their stories, Ezidi women illustrate the gradual reconfiguration of gender roles once treated as fixed—subtly reshaping expectations around family, religion, and community. In doing so, they lay claim to new forms of agency and begin to inhabit identities that, until recently, were considered impermissible—if not unimaginable. These narratives reveal how women are reconstructing not only their selves, but their society, after the rupture of genocide.
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Geopolitics & Memory
Center for Geopolitics, University of Cambridge
WATCH NOW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kyco1eHki48
Description: We are pleased to invite you to Geopolitics & memory, the next panel discussion of our Geopolitics and …event series which looks at how geopolitics shapes the arts and humanities, and how they in turn shape geopolitics. Geopolitics & memory aims to explore how historical memory influences both collective and individual understandings of and responses to contemporary geopolitical issues. We will explore how collective memory shapes the way societies interpret global events. From public monuments and national narratives to cultural trauma and the politics of remembrance, memory plays a crucial role in how communities understand their place in the world and respond to ongoing global challenges. Through thought-provoking presentations and interdisciplinary discussion, this online event will examine questions such as: How do societies remember – and forget – conflict, colonialism, and migration? What role does memory play in nationalist movements, international diplomacy, and global justice? And how are artists, writers, historians, and policymakers engaging with memory to challenge or reinforce dominant geopolitical narratives?
Dr Richard Latham Lechowick is a Research Associate with the Global History Lab at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. In this role, he spearheads the Narrative Observatories programme, a peer-led, globally connected research initiative that empowers observers to investigate how stories shape society, identity, and memory within and between communities.
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-- PAST EVENTS --
Cambridge Refugee Week: Politics of Knowledge, Power, and the Struggle for Academic Futures
Location
Market Square
Cambridge, UK
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North Sea Dialogues: Academic Freedom and Self-Censorship Workshop at SCAS
Location
Swedish Collegium of Advanced Studies
University of Uppsala, Sweden
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Ethnography in Emergencies: Working with Women after the Sinjar Genocide
Part of Darwin College Humanities Lectures
Location:
Darwin College
University of Cambridge
https://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/228826
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Art for a Better World
Part of Cambridge Festival
Public Launch of Art Show. Art for a Better World allows visitors to take a journey around the world, through cartoons from international artists, making the latest research about pressing social challenges accessible to general audiences. With reflections by Aid-Worker and Academic, Richard Latham Lechowick.
Location:
Alison Richard Building
University of Cambridge
https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/46473/
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The Story Makers - (Workshop)
Part of Cambridge Festival
*** SECOND SESSION ADDED ***
Description:
The Story Makers will be a crash course in talking to people and collecting narratives. After a short talk about the role of stories in creating and sustaining society (and ourselves), we will dive right in to the methods and practices of ethnographic interviewing. We will discuss the shared knowledge production that occurs in interviews—the dynamics of ‘storytelling’ and ‘storylistening’—and, in this process, we will all become storymakers!
Everyone tells stories. We tell stories with friends, family, strangers; we do it though conversations, jokes, social media; we do it with words, photos, videos, paintings; we do it to make sense of the world, to make people laugh, to align our beliefs with our actions. In the same ways, everyone is also a storylistener. So much of our day-to-day life revolves around stories being told and being heard. Stories make us who we are and they help us navigate through our day-to-day lives.
Dr Rick Latham Lechowick has interviewed everyone from actors in Hollywood to sectarian militia commanders in Iraq. His 2024 book, ‘I won’t let them be like me’, is a collection and discussion of narratives collected with Ezidi women after the Sinjar Genocide.
Despite that serious topic, this workshop will be aimed at all ages—at anyone interested in discovering and inspiring stories, be they family stories, travel stories, adventure stories, cooking stories. Everyone is welcome. (Collecting narratives of the older generations tends to be a particularly fun experience for younger storymakers!) Whether working alone, with friends, or as a part of a family unit, the storymaking process is possible and exciting for all.
Finally, it is at the end where the work really begins. At the workshop’s conclusion, participants will head off to find and gather narratives. Then, after a week or so, we will reconvene online to follow up (timing TBD), in order to discuss how the story collection process has gone, and to discuss any obstacles encountered. After that gathering, and a recursive look at our practices, participants can either write up what they have already collected or the can go off and collect more narratives before writing up.
Location:
Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
University of Cambridge
Session 01: https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/45827/
Session 02: https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/46381/
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Oral History after Genocide (Talk)
Part of Selwyn College History Society
Description: Dr. Lechowick will explore the advantages and disadvantages of the oral history and ethnographic methodologies used in his research. He will also discuss the final results of the research which culminated in his book, 'I won't let them be like me': Ezidi Women's Agency and Identity after the Sinjar Genocide'.
Location:
Selwyn College
University of Cambridge