Welcome to the class. I'm J.P. Baraybar. I'm a forensic anthropologist from Peru, hence the accent. For the last 20 or so years. I've been working in forensic anthropology and human rights. Missing persons have been my primary interest. But I've been dealing with missing persons from the perspective of enforced disappearances, people that are taken pretty much by state authorities or people that are supported by the state. And it is new for me as well to deal with something that you are much more acquainted with, that is missing persons, runaways, people taken by some other people, people killed in the midst of escaping from one place or the other, people moving within the states, and so on. 

So we had amalgamated all that into a course that will give you a perspective from what you really know, or seem to know, and for the things you do not know, primarily political disappearances, and so on. And also, we're going to be focusing on a number of techniques that can be used to improve your investigative skills, a number of techniques that can be used to search for remains. Because most of the people that are missing or disappeared generally are dead or end up dead. And try primarily to spin around things, to discuss things from different perspectives. 

So I would say the course, that we all will learn. You know it's not me who are going to be just teaching. There will be a lot of work that you'll need to be doing. We're going to be using information from various sources, academic papers, less academic papers, media, and so on. And I'll present you primarily with the questions that are very provocative. 

I would like to expand on those questions to really surprise me, like hit me with some, I mean crazy ideas if you have. And my main interest is concentrated on, what are the mechanisms that we can actually get to try to solve these very complex cases and experience told me that it's not only one way. There are many, many ways. 

So, is there a lot of literature written about this? I would say no. All these things are in the making. So this course is very experimental in that respect. Because I cannot give you a textbook you know, somebody wrote whatever, how to do it, a recipe of any kind. There's no recipes. Problems change. But there's a common denominator along all the problems and all the conflicts that remains all the same. So I think it's going to be cool.