On June 2, 2023, Rita Kopp received the Exam Prize of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena for the best master thesis of the last academic year at the Chair of International Relations. In her master thesis, Rita Kopp dealt with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada, which investigated and addressed the injustices inflicted on Indigenous people in the Canadian school system. More specifically, it addressed the question of why, eight years after the publication of the final report, most of the 94 recommendations have still not been implemented, even though both the government and the opposition have largely backed them. The focus is not on the work of the Truth Commission itself, but on the implementation phase. By applying a critical discourse analysis, Rita Kopp examined statements by the Prime Minister, the Senate and the House of Commons. Her master thesis was supervised by Prof. Dr Rafael Biermann (Jena) and Dr Sabine Mannitz (PRIF).
Rita Kopp is a research associate at PRIF and is developing a dissertation concept on the Canadian Truth Commission. Her areas of focus are memory and reconciliation policy and transitional justice. She is also researching discourses around missing and killed Indigenous women in Canada for the project “Evils of a Global Past? Post-colonial Genocide Memory and Glocally Entangled Reconciliation Politics”.