Join us for this hybrid event with Dr Omer Aijazi, Lecturer in Disasters and Climate Crisis at the Humanitarian & Conflict Research Institute (HCRI), to hear about and discuss the content of his new book - Atmospheric Violence.
ABOUT THE EVENT
Time: 16:00 - 17:30, 23rd Oct 2024
Location: Ellen Wilkinon Building + Zoom (Room sent to registrants)
Discussant: Dr Rubina Jasani, HCRI
Open to all but REGISTRATION is essential via https://atmospheric-violence.eventbrite.co.uk
ABOUT THE BOOK
Atmospheric Violence grapples with the afterlife of environmental disasters and armed conflict and examines how people attempt to flourish despite and alongside continuing violence. Departing from conventional approaches to the study of disaster and conflict that have dominated academic studies of Kashmir, Dr Omer Aijazi’s ethnography of life in the borderlands instead explores possibilities for imagining life otherwise, in an environment where violence is everywhere, or atmospheric.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan’s control and its surrounding mountainscapes, the book takes us to two remote mountainous valleys that have been shaped by recurring environmental disasters, as well as by the landscape of no-go zones, army barracks, and security checkpoints of the contested India/Pakistan border. Through a series of interconnected scenes from the lives of five protagonists, all of whom are precariously situated within their families or societies and rarely enjoy the expected protections of state or community, Dr Aijazi reveals the movements, flows, and intimacies sustained by a landscape that enables alternative modes of life.
Blurring the distinctions between story, theory, and activism, he explores what emerges when theory becomes a project of seeing and feeling from the non-normative standpoint of those who, like the book’s protagonists, do not subscribe to the rules by which most others have come to know the world.
Bringing the critical study of disaster into conversation with a radical humanist anthropology and the capaciousness of affect theory, held accountable to Black studies and Indigenous studies, Dr Aijazi offers a decolonial approach to disaster studies centering not on trauma and rupture but rather on repair?the social labour through which communities living with disaster refuse the conditions of death imposed upon them and create viable lives for themselves, even amidst constant diminishment and world-annihilation.
ABOUT HCRI
The Humanitarian & Conflict Response Institute (HCRI) is a leading global centre for the study of humanitarianism and conflict response, global health, international disaster management and peacebuilding.
Our work is driven by a desire to inform and support policy and decision makers, to optimise collaborations between partner organisations, and to foster increased understanding and debate within the field.
Bringing together disciplines from medicine to the humanities, we research questions and issues related to what the United Nations calls the ‘triple nexus’ – humanitarian response, development and peace. Our aim is to facilitate improvements in crisis response on a global scale.
For more, visit: https://www.hcri.manchester.ac.uk/
