Exhibition Panel: Archiving ISIS

This event was organised as part of the Genocidal Captivity exhibition events series.
This virtual panel will discuss how primary source documentation related to the activities of the transnational jihadist terrorist organisation, Islamic State (IS, or ISIS), has been collected, archived and made accessible for research, intelligence and other purposes over the last two decades.
Chaired by co-curator Dr Becky Jinks, the panel will discuss the myriad practical and legal issues of collecting IS-related materials, as well as the ethics of archiving and making accessible extremely sensitive materials that relate to unfolding events.
About the Speakers:
Dr Leyla Ferman is the Co-Founder of Yazidi Justice Committee and Director of Women for Justice. She is the coordinator of FERMAN, a documentation and education project, at the Foundation of Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation in Germany. Before, she was working as an advisor to the co-Mayors at Mardin Metropolitan Municipality.
Dr Devorah Margolin is the Blumenstein-Rosenbloom Fellow at The Washington Institute and an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University. Her research primarily focuses on terrorism governance, terrorism financing, the role of propaganda and strategic communications, countering/preventing violent extremism, and the role of women and gender in violent extremism. She was also the Project Manager for the ISIS Files Digital Repository, a collection of over 15,000 pages of original ISIS materials found in Nineveh Province in Iraq by the New York Times.
Dr. Aaron Y. Zelin is the Gloria and Ken Levy Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he also directs the Islamic State Worldwide Activity Map project. Zelin is also a Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of Politics at Brandeis University, Founder of the widely acclaimed website Jihadology, and a contributing writer for War on the Rock’s Adversarial newsletter. He is author of the book Your Sons Are At Your Service: Tunisia’s Missionaries of Jihad (Columbia University Press) and is currently working on a second book tentatively titled Heart of the Believers: A History of Syrian Jihadism. Zelin’s research focuses on Sunni jihadi groups in the Levant, North Africa, the Sahel, and Afghanistan as well as the trends of jihadi governance, online mobilization, and foreign fighting. He has conducted field research in Tunisia, Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel. Zelin has also testified and served as an expert witness in front of the U.S. House of Representatives and with the Department of Justice in federal judicial terrorism trials.
Chaired by:
Dr Rebecca Jinks is a historian of comparative genocide and humanitarianism at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Representing Genocide: The Holocaust as Paradigm?, which examines the ways in which representations of the Holocaust have influenced how other genocides are understood and represented, focusing on the ‘canonical’ cases of genocide - Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Her current research project, ‘Genocidal Captivity’, is funded by the AHRC and explores the experiences of Armenian and Yezidi women genocide survivors in 1915 and 2014.