Research Agenda

Bodies, violence, and power: this constellation is tightly interlinked. Wherever we examine political power, we see bodies that give it meaning: bodies that are exploited for their labor; bodies that are maimed; bodies that are left unburied or hidden away in mass graves. These bodies form the substance of political power by killing and being killed, producing and consuming. Yet the materiality of these bodies – their status as bodies as such – is rarely addressed in political analyses. The material body is generally held as an object on which power is enacted or displayed, but rarely is the body a political subject. My research offers a corrective to this perspective by bringing the material body, flesh and bone, to the forefront of my analysis. In doing so, I argue that accounting for the materiality of the body changes the terrain of politics. This shift in perspective makes it possible to ask and answer new kinds of questions: what aspects of violence become legible when we shift our fundamental unit of analysis from the abstract agent or subject to the material body; a living entity capable of experiencing pain and destruction? What can we learn by reading closely and critically the many instances in which the body is hurt, destroyed, and remade?

This methodological shift makes previously overlooked dimensions of violence visible, including forms of violence that are commonly dismissed as senseless or meaningless like extra-lethal and self-destructive violence. These acts of violence increasingly define our world, and are all too frequently treated as beyond understanding. My lens suggests that these acts are not incomprehensible. Rather, we have been using flawed methods to examine them. Focusing on the material body brings into view the ways in which this violence resists, by its very nature, the imposition of order and the possibility of management. It challenges a number of important assumptions about how management and order themselves might be possible, given the fragility of and flows between bodies. In deploying this lens, I theorize bodies as sites of disruption; places where boundaries are both established and remade.

BOOK project

What does an act of violence mean? This simple question flies in the face of so much contemporary political discourse, in which it is commonplace – if not mandatory – to describe every act of violence as “senseless” or “meaningless.” This book offers an alternative framework for thinking about political violence which places the body at the center of analysis. I argue that a focus on violence as it is experienced (both by those who undertake acts of violence and those who are subjected to them) can enrich the study of violence, which is often impoverished by the tendency to reduce bodies to numbers or flattened data points. The project focuses on four cases: detention center conditions, interrogatory torture, suicide bombing, and self-immolation. In each chapter, I challenge the assumption that material differences between forms of violence are unrelated to the political projects of those who deploy them and instead offer situated and materially specific analyses of these forms of violence. Through an analysis of these cases, I show how the destruction of the body is imbricated in both the consolidation of state domination and in opening possibilities for resistance. These case studies include over forty different sites of violence, which span across six continents and incorporate over eighty years of recent history.