Co-directors: Zareena Grewal & Madiha Tahir
Programming during academic year 2023-2024–a conference and workshop series–including artist invitations–will engage the next generation of scholarship and art on US militarism and war on the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. Tentatively called, Can You Hear Us Now? Research & the Temporalities of War, these events will bring established and rising scholars in the fields of anthropology, Black Studies, and postcolonial and decolonial studies to Yale to expand and deepen campus conversations on US’ intersections with the world. Workshops attached to the conference series will provide a space for faculty and students across disciplines and fieldsites to further collaborate and engage methods including ethnography, experimental research methods, performance ethnography, and the craft of writing.
Two decades of the Global War on Terror have profoundly transformed the terms of US politics and given new shape to what constitutes critical questions in the humanities and social sciences. From questions about the use of drones and digital war to the use of freelance fighters, the current attention to the Ukraine-Russia war is haunted by the specter of the US’ multi-decade and multiple invasions. The GWoT is not over for those whom it targeted; nor is it over for the US whose responses to current emerging conflicts are conditioned by it.
A cohort of established and rising scholars are now publishing works that interrogate the ambiguities of US hegemony with rich interdisciplinary research grounded amidst war zones, Islamist guerrilla fighters, transnational South-South solidarity movements, among other areas. This research expands beyond issues of US infrastructures and diplomatic aggression that were the focus of earlier works.
This conference and seminar series will place current US politics and culture within a global context and situate the humanities and social sciences as a critical site through which to understand and assess our militarist present.
Events and participants will be announced at the outset of the new academic year.