Women Walking as Territories of Truth

11th session of CEFRES in-house seminar
Through the presentation of works in progress, CEFRES’s Seminar aims at raising and discussing issues about methods, approaches or concepts, in a multidisciplinary spirit, allowing everyone to confront her or his own perspectives with the research presented.

Location: CEFRES Library , Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
Date: Tuesday, May 26, 2026, 16:30
Language: English

Speaker: Sophie RAEHME (CEFRES / CEU)
Discussant: Petr VAŠÁT (Institute of Sociology, AV ČR)

Abstract

This paper is the result of working with eleven women buscadoras (searchers) from Mujeres Caminando por la Verdad in Medellín, who have spent decades searching for loved ones forcibly disappeared during Colombia’s urban armed conflict.

Following their collective walking practices, rituals, and memory art in and around Comuna 13, the presentation centers both the women’s sustained political struggle for truth, justice, and repair, and the ongoing presence of absence of their loved ones that shapes their everyday lives. Their loved ones remain disappeared, yet continuously present in their actions, relationships, and forms of remembrance.

This long-term struggle has persisted largely beyond public attention, even as sites such as La Escombrera—widely believed to contain one of Latin America’s largest mass graves—have only recently gained wider visibility. At the same time, their resistance has travelled beyond Colombia through transnational memory practices, including the circulation of the mural/graffiti “Las cuchas tienen la razón” (the cuchas (elderly women and mothers) are right), which has been reproduced in European capital city walls such as Vienna as a form of diasporic solidarity.

This presentation traces how the women sustain memory, demand truth, and resist ongoing erasure in a context of impunity that continues more than two decades after the violence.

Please find the complete program of 2025–2026 seminar here.