Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir

With speaker Omer Aijazi, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Disasters and Climate Crisis, Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester

Atmospheric Violence explores how people in the militarised, ecologically fragile borderlands of Kashmir attempt to flourish in an environment where violence is everywhere, or atmospheric. I take us to remote mountainous valleys in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan’s control, where life has been shaped by recurring environmental disasters and by the violence of the India/Pakistan border. Through a series of interconnected scenes, I explore what it means to theorise from the standpoint of those who do not subscribe to the rules by which most others have come to know the world. In conversation with a radical humanist anthropology and affect theory, held accountable to Black and Indigenous studies, I offer a decolonial approach to disaster studies centering not on trauma and rupture but rather on repair—the social labour of creating and maintaining viable life, even amidst constant diminishment and world-annihilation.

Biography

Omer Aijazi is a critical disaster studies scholar and decolonial ethnographer of borderland South Asia. He is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Disasters and Climate Crisis at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester.

The IDD Guest Seminar Series brings scholars and practitioners working on international development to the University of Birmingham to share their latest research and ideas. All seminars are open to staff, students, and the general public.