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, 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, 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, Aijazi offers a decolonial approach to disaster studies centering not on trauma and rupture but rather on repair—the social labor 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.

While there is a tacit appreciation that freedom from violence will lead to more prosperous relations among peoples, violence continues to be deployed for various political and social ends. Yet the problem of violence still defies neat description, subject to many competing interpretations. Histories of Violence offers an accessible yet compelling examination of the problem of violence as it appears in the corpus of canonical figures – from Hannah Arendt to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault to Slavoj Žižek – who continue to influence and inform contemporary political, philosophical, sociological, cultural, and anthropological study. Written by a team of internationally renowned experts, this is an essential interrogation of post-war critical thought as it relates to violence.

Urban violence still has a peculiar standing within social and urban research. This book works to unpack the link between urban, violence, and security with three main arguments. The first is that urban violence is under-theorized because long-term theoretical problems with both of its elements (‘urban’ and ‘violence’). The second is to answer these questions: (1) how can violence be conceptualized in a way that opens to an understanding of the specificity of urban violence? (2) What is the urban in urban violence? And (3) How can ‘urban’ and ‘violence’ be articulated in a way that makes urban violence a category with both analytical and strategic power? The third, and central, argument of this book is that, through a genealogy that articulates political economic and vital materialism, urban violence can ultimately be framed as a precise category shaped by three interlocking trajectories: the process of (capitalist) urbanization, the spatio-political project of the urban, and the concrete urban atmospheres in and through which the process and the project materialize, often violently so, in the urban.

Madness, Violence, and Power: A Critical Collection disengages from the common forms of discussion about violence related to mental health service users and survivors which position those users or survivors as more likely to enact violence or become victims of violence. Instead, this book seeks to broaden understandings of violence manifest in the lives of mental health service users/survivors, ‘push’ current considerations to explore the impacts of systems and institutions that manage ‘abnormality’, and to create and foster space to explore the role of our own communities in justice and accountability dialogues. This critical collection constitutes an integral contribution to critical scholarship on violence and mental illness by addressing a gap in the existing literature by broadening the “violence lens,” and inviting an interdisciplinary conversation that is not narrowly biomedical and neuro-scientific.

This book focuses on processes of bordering and governmentality around the Greek border islands from the declaration of a ‘refugee crisis’ in the summer of 2015 up until the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The chapters trace the implementation of the EU migration hotspot approach across space and time, from the maritime Aegean border to the islands (Lesvos and Samos) and from the islands to the Greek mainland. They do so through the lenses of peoples’ refusal to succumb to categories that get reified as identities through the hotspot approach, such as that of the ‘deserving refugee’, the ‘undeserving economic migrant’, the ‘translator’, the ‘volunteer’, the ‘tourist’ and the ‘researcher’. This book explores how ‘migration management’ in Greece from 2015-2020, along with the reshaping of space and time, reconfigured peoples’ relationships with one another and ultimately with one’s self.

This book claims a political value for olfactory artworks by situating them squarely in the contemporary moment of various forms of political resistance. Each chapter presents the current research and art practices of an international group of artists and writers from the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, Thailand, Sweden, and the Netherlands. The book brings together new thinking on the potential for olfactory art to critique and produce modes of engagement that challenge the still-powerful hegemonic realities of the twenty-first century, particularly the dominance of vision as opposed to other sensory modalities. The book will be of interest to scholars working in contemporary art, art history, visual culture, olfactory studies, performance studies, and politics of activism.

"During the postwar period, experiments on prison populations were standard practice among many universities, public health agencies, and major pharmaceutical manufacturers across the United States. Thus, the operative question in Skin Theory is: What was it about the US prison that made it so amenable to medical science research? A visual study for critically understanding entwined sites of imprisonment and scientific knowledge production, Skin Theory speaks directly to the crucial moments immediately before two large American industries, one carceral and the other pharmaceutical, saw their fantastic rise and dominance, honing in on when their interests and operations came together in explicit ways. It revisits the notorious dermatological experiments conducted between 1952 and 1974 at Holmesburg Prison, Philadelphia, analyzing skin in its technological, spatial, and discursive dimensions to illustrate a profound antagonism between knowledge and freedom made visible through the body of the captive test subject, a racialized subject whose boundless availability to scientific and cultural representation complicates the very notion of skin. This study offers an important reframing of critical approaches to race in histories of science, medicine, and technology, redefining science as already a fundamentally racial project. A visual analysis of how medical science and incarceration together formed a race-making technology and geography reconfiguring the nation's long history of captivity, from slavery to mass incarceration, Skin Theory shifts from issues of scientific racism to the scientific rationality of racism itself"--

"From 1940 to 1945, forty thousand patients died in French psychiatric hospitals. The Vichy Regime's "soft extermination" let patients die of cold, starvation, or lack of care. Yet, in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a small village in central France, one psychiatric hospital attempted to resist. Hoarding food with the help of the population, the staff not only worked to keep patients alive but began to rethink the practical and theoretical bases of psychiatric care. The movement that began at Saint-Alban and came to be known as "institutional psychotherapy" would go on to have a profound influence on postwar French thought.Though the movement was varied, and the point was never to devise a dogma or a model that could be applied indiscriminately, institutional psychotherapy did attempt to offer an "ethics," or a practice of everyday life. Among its most important principles were the belief that theory and practice were inextricably linked, and that psychiatric practice was explicitly political. Camille Robcis traces the history of institutional psychotherapy from its inception to its various transformations between 1945 and 1975. Each chapter of the book is organized around a thinker who was either at Saint-Alban or who engaged with institutional psychotherapy: from François Tosquelles, Franz Fanon, Jean Oury and Félix Guattari, to Michel Foucault. They made up a fascinating constellation within which unexpected relationships between characters, contexts, and ideas--often seemingly fragmentary of tangential--emerged"--