In-durable Sociality: Precarious Life in Common and the Temporal Boundaries of the Social

This article considers the essential and unenduring attachments among grievously war-injured US soldiers remaking their lives at a military hospital. Their sense of being in common makes life bearable, but they do not constitute a community or even a cohort. Their profound attachments are especially brittle, breaking off cleanly as the contingencies of their unstable bodies intervene. Here, the enduring temporality of the social is secondary to practices of being between emergence and collapse. Addressing sociality here is not a romantic celebration of precarity or resilient intimacies. The article does not invest sociality and its residual social formations with lasting or redemptive force. Simply put, intimate and institutional attachments, both elected and involuntary, remain vital in the presence of pain even if they do not herald a hopeful futurity. In-durable sociality emerges as an ethics for now, situated in sociopolitical and material arrangement of the American afterwar that papers the present over with imagined futures: the individuating triumph of rehabilitation, the collectivizing identification with a war that could seem worth it, the stabilizing conjugation of we in a heteronational domestic life. The article traces injured soldiers’ experiences of being in common with others askance to this constellation of things to come, relating sociality to bare facts of perdurance

After war

In the United States – as in other places in the ambit of biomedicine – the efforts exerted on and by injured soldiers’ bodies in the aftermath of war are generally understood under the familiar medical rubric of ‘rehabilitation’. This reflection troubles that term by moving away from the medical logic of rehabilitation and its telos of injury and healing, and the logics that see injured soldiers as promising bodies. Instead, the think piece explores a wider range of practices of attention to injured soldiers’ bodies that emerge ethnographically, and traces embodied forms of being made within unsteady temporalities of life, health, and death after war, forms that call the temporality of rehabilitation into question and highlight care’s collateral affects. I reflect on the phenomenon of heterotopic ossification – bone growth at the site of injury that is a sign of healing that is also itself a form of injury – to think through the confounding analytical, ethical, political, and corporeal implications of such a space

All that is Solid Burns into Smoke: US Military Burn Pits, Petrochemical Toxicity, and the Racial Geopolitics of Displacement

Focusing on US military burn pits in Iraq, this paper traces entanglements between the materials of US war-making, the logistics of global capitalism, and the racialized displacement of toxicity and chemical kinship. In interviews about their experiences of burn pits at Joint Base Balad, a city-sized US military base located in Yathrib, Iraq, US veterans living along the US Gulf Coast linked their exposures to the toxicity of burn pits in Iraq with petrochemical exposures in their everyday lives at home. These links forged a chemical kinship with domestic others, while largely overlooking such kinship with Iraqis who share veterans' body burden. Yet I suggest that in these veterans' attention to logistics and infrastructure lies the possibility of a more expansive account of chemical kinship, one that cuts across the racialized distinctions of foreign and domestic, and gendered imaginaries of the domestic as a comfortable space for the reproduction of homophilic kin. I describe this dual imperative of the domestic as an ideology of domestic security. The toxicity of burn pits helps us to undermine this ideology of domestic security, opening new spaces to reckon with the relation between US and Iraqi experiences of US military toxicity

View to the U: an eye on UTM Research

This is an audio recording from the podcast series "View to the U: An eye on UTM research".A sweeping scholarly smorgasbord On this episode of VIEW to the U, the guest is Zoë Wool, an assistant professor from UTM’s Department of Anthropology. Very few researchers cover as much ground in a research program as Zoë does, and over the course of this interview, Zoë talks about this range of work, which spans medical and sociocultural anthropology, and examines the harms of war and toxic burn pits that the US military use around the world, as well as her focus on disability and technology studies, queer theory, and feminist science studies. Zoë also talks about how she got into this area of research in the first place, she imparts some words of advice for other people who are also just starting out at UTM, particularly students, what her strategies are for mitigating stress, and also some interesting little-known facts about her days prior to becoming an academic. Zoë is also the Director of a newly launched feminist research space focused on experimental approaches to studying toxicity, waste and infrastructure across the social sciences and humanities. The TWIG Research Kitchen is based with Zoë in the Anthropology department at UTM, with additional support from UTM’s Collaborative Digital Research Space (CDRS) and also the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI). Zoë joined the faculty at UTM in 2020