Unsettling Anthropology: Violence, Terror, and Resistance

Unsettling Anthropology: Violence, Terror, and Resistance

Date: Thursday, September 12, 2024
Time: 2:45pm -4:45pm ET
Location: Virtual
Register: https://yorku.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcod-uvpzIrHtA9OF3FIIjTE5j9PSF37l8R#/registration

The recent calls to moralize violence, to condemn or to relativize it, disregard the inherently political nature of violence, that violence 'creates and sustains' political meanings (Paul Kahn 2008). This talk series focuses on political imagination behind all acts of violence, of the willingness of people to kill and being killed and, especially, aims to unsettle common assumptions and moral rhetorics which are pressed down upon us to condemn the violence of 'the others,' disregarding the meanings of and the historical context of their actions.

Jennie E. Burnet is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Institute for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta, United States of America. Her research explores the cultural and psychological aspects of war, genocide, and mass violence and the micro-level impact of large-scale social change in the context of conflict. She is the award-winning author of Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory and Silence in Rwanda. Her 2023 book, To Save Heaven and Earth: Rescue during the Rwandan Genocide, examines how and why some Rwandans risked their lives to save Tutsi from the carnage.