| Abstract | This article considers truth commission public hearings as a genre of public memory. Building on transitional justice, public memory, public deliberation and meetings, and trauma and witnessing research, it examines how public hearings of truth commissions engage in public memorializing about mass violence. Drawing on ethnographic observation and textual analysis of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia Diaspora Project public hearings, this article elaborates three characteristics of the public hearing genre: they are ritual performance events that engage audiences and are focused on representations of violence in first-person testimony. Understanding these events communicatively provides insight into how to create inclusive, representative responses to mass violence and extends our understanding of public memory, deliberation, and meetings to post-conflict contexts.
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