About us: Since its formation in 2013 The NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar Research Collaborative https://wp.nyu.edu/culturesofwar/ has aimed to contribute to the debates around war culture and to produce concrete outcomes for post-war cultural policies which bridge the divides between academia, veterans, the military, activists, writers and creative artists in today’s challenging global climate.
Past Events:
NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar presents:
Screening of acclaimed documentary Afghanistan Undercover (Frontline PBS, 2022)
and Conversation with Frontline Correspondent, Ramita Navai
Wednesday 30th November at 6.00pm
In Person and on Zoom
244 Greene Street, Event Space
RSVP here
NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar is delighted to host an in-person and Zoom event: a screening of the PBS Frontline documentary Afghanistan Undercover followed by a talk back discussion with Frontline correspondent, Ramita Navai, and Arifa Fatimi, one of the brilliant and brave Afghan activist women featured.
Join us to learn more about the pressing issues faced by Afghan women since the abrupt US military withdrawal from the region and the Taliban takeover.
It will take place in person in the Event Space (Room 106) in the NYU English department, at 244 Greene Street on Wednesday 30th November at 6pm and on Zoom https://nyu.zoom.us/j/98641402258
This event is free and open to the public, but visitors to NYU will need to provide ID and proof of vaccination.
In Afghanistan Undercover, Ramita Navai (Iraq Uncovered, Syria Undercover) finds women who are being punished by the regime and confronts Taliban officials. She reveals the harsh realities of life for women under the Taliban’s rule, meeting a group of female lawyers forbidden from working, riding along with an underground network of female activists who go on dangerous rescue missions and secretly filming in a jail where women are being held by the Taliban without trial or charge.
Ramita Navai is an Emmy and Robert F. Kennedy award-winning British-Iranian investigative journalist, documentary maker, author and host of “The Line of Fire” podcast. With a reputation for working in hostile environments, she has reported from over forty countries, made over thirty documentaries and features and worked as a foreign correspondent for print.
Twitter: @ramitanavai Instagram: @senoritaramita Website: www.ramitanavai.com
Since its formation in 2013, the Cultures of War and the Postwar Research Collaborative https://wp.nyu.edu/culturesofwar has aimed through its public programming to contribute to the debates around war culture and to produce concrete outcomes for post-war cultural policies which bridge the divides between academia, veterans, the military, activists, writers and creative artists in today’s challenging global climate.
Please contact Emily Foister (emf387@nyu.edu) or Patrick Deer (pd46@nyu.edu) for more details.
Race and Policing in the Americas Seminar Series Closing Roundtable
Thursday December 9th, 2021, 12:30-2.00pm EST
Watch the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/UpvcvjKsTiY
The NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar Research Group, in conjunction with the Centre for the Americas and the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast, invite you to the closing event of a seminar series examining the complex relationship between race, class, and policing in the Americas.Panelists:
Sonia is Associate Professor of Linguistic Anthropology at New York University and Co-Editor-In-Chief of the flagship Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. She is the author of Linguistic Rivalries: Tamil Migrants and Anglo-Franco Conflicts (Oxford UP 2016), a study of the migration and diasporic experiences of Tamil-speaking Indians and Sri Lankans since the 1840s. Her current research examines how the big data of body-worn camera and predictive policing perpetuates racial inequities in U.S. law enforcement. https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/sonia-das.html
Gabriella I. Johnson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at NYU, where her research and teaching focuses on African American literature, Black feminist theories, and prison abolitionist thought. She is currently writing her dissertation on 20th-century African American women’s fiction as a prison abolitionist imagination.
Stuart is Associate Research Professor in the Center for Africana Studies and the Associate Director of the Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship. He is the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (U of California Press, 2019) which looks at the relationship between US projections of power overseas and the rise of the carceral state at home. His new project examines the political activities of police in the United States since the 1960s, via professional organizations and unions. https://soc.jhu.edu/directory/stuart-schrader/
Nikhil is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History and Faculty Director of NYU’s Prison Education Program. A historian of race, empire, and culture in the 20th-century United States, Singh is the author of Race and America’s Long War (U of California Press 2017) and the award-winning, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard UP 2004). A new book Exceptional Empire: Race, Colonialism and the Origins of US Globalism is in-progress, and forthcoming from Harvard University Press. https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/nikhil-singh.html
Patrick Deer is Associate Professor of English at NYU and co-organizer of the NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar research group. He published a scholarly book about war writing and war culture in World War II, Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire and Modern British Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009; paperback ed. 2016). His current book project is We Are All Embedded: Understanding American War Culture Since 9/11. https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/patrick-deer.htmlHosted by the Cultures of War research group at NYU. https://wp.nyu.edu/culturesofwar/
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Panel Discussion: Crime Fiction, Policing and Racial Injustice
Watch video here: https://youtu.be/aw2aiq02Q3g
The NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar Research Group, in conjunction with the Centre for the Americas and the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast, invite you to a panel discussion as part of a seminar series examining the complex relationship between race, class, and policing in the Americas.
Join Frankie Bailey (SUNY Albany), David Schmid (SUNY Buffalo), and novelist Steph Cha to discuss the capacities of crime fiction to critically reflect on the failures of policing in the US and the ongoing search for racial justice. The issue of whether a form or genre given over to the investigation of crime and that aims to give readers answers and resolutions can get to grips with the brokenness of the justice system will be discussed. As will the question of how to portray the police and policing in light of the killing of unarmed black men and women—and whether the traditional police procedural form is fit for purpose.
Steph Cha will also read from her 2019 prize-winning novel, Your House Will Pay, and take questions about it.
Frankie Bailey is Professor of Criminal Justice in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs at SUNY Albany. As well as being a prolific academic whose work explores the intersections of crime, social history and popular culture, including Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters Crime and Detective Fiction (1991), she is the author of The Red Queen Dies(2013) and What the Fly Saw(2015).
David Schmid is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Buffalo. His research focuses on Americans’ unusual fascination with murder and murderers and the development of the popular culture of true crime in the U.S. He is the author of the book Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture(University of Chicago Press, 2005) as well as numerous edited books, anthologies and essays on crime fiction, urban studies, horror and masculinity.
Steph Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay (2019), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the California Book Award, and the Juniper Song crime trilogy. She is a critic whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she served as noir editor, and is the current series editor of the Best American Mystery & Suspense anthology.
Moderated by Andrew Pepper (Queen’s University Belfast), author of Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State (Oxford, 2016), co-editor with David Schmid (Buffalo), Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction: A World of Crime (Palgrave, 2016) and also the author of five crime novels set in London between the 1820s and 1840s including The Last Days of Newgate (2006), The Detective Branch (2010) and Bloody Winter (2011).
You can register for this event here
Race and Policing in the Americas Seminar Series: Police Violence in Brazil
(Link to register on Eventbrite to watch free on Vimeo)
Police Killing (Auto de Resistência) is a 2018 Brazilian documentary, directed by Natasha Neri and Lula Carvalho, about homicides committed by on-duty police officers in Rio de Janeiro, in situations initially considered as legitimate self-defense. The dead person is accused of being a drug dealer and having fired against the police. However, the officer’s account is confronted by the emergence of videos and the fight of mothers who try to prove their sons were innocent. The film portrays the clash of versions in court hearings, the backstage of police investigations and the State Parliamentary Inquiry Committee established to investigate the high rates of homicides during police operations.The film won the prize for best feature at the It’s All True – International Documentary Film Festival in 2018 as well as a nomination for the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam’s (IDFA) Amsterdam Human Rights Award.
View the trailer with English subtitles here.
Read more about the film in English and in Portuguese.
Visit this page to receive a link to watch the film (in Portuguese with English subtitles). The film can be watched online until October 27, 2021.
Panel Discussion with director: Perspectives on Police Violence in Brazil — Data, Documentary, Ethnography, Wednesday, October 27th, 11.00am-12.30pm (EST)
Zoom
In this panel discussion (via Zoom), anthropologist Christen Smith (Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016), filmmaker Natasha Neri (director of the prize-winning documentary Auto de Resistência/Police Killing), and data researcher Pedro Paulo da Silva (researcher at the Centre for Security and Citizenship Studies, Rio de Janeiro, and the research coordinator of the Laboratory of Data and Narratives from Jacarezinho, a favela in Rio) will explore how research undertaken and disseminated in different contexts (both within and outside of universities) and formats (from publications to documentary film and digital media and beyond) can contribute to raising critical awareness of police violence in Brazil, including in gendered and comparative perspective.Chair: Tori Holmes (Queen’s University Belfast)
View the full schedule of the Race and Policing in the Americas Seminar Series here.
Race and Policing in the Americas Seminar Series Keynote with Prof. Micol Seigel, Indiana University, “The Shape of the Whole, Or, the There There”
Wednesday, October 20th, 2:00 pm (EST) on Zoom.
Recent work on policing has shifted the focus of carceral studies from prisons to the mechanisms that fill them. Abolitionist scholar-activists now include police in their sights as a matter of course. Our keynote speaker, Professor Micol Seigel, takes this broadening vision a step farther to look at another isle of the carceral archipelago—or a submerged crag of the iceberg—that too often evades critical focus.
Micol Seigel is Professor of American Studies and History at Indiana University Bloomington. She is the author of Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Duke UP, 2009) and editor of Panic, Transnational Cultural Studies and the Affective Contours of Power (Routledge, 2018). In her most recent book, Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police (Duke UP, 2018) she offers a new theorization of the quintessential incarnation of state power: the police. Foregrounding the interdependence of policing, the state, and global capital, Seigel redefines policing as “violence work,” showing how it is shaped by its role of channeling state violence.
The NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar Research Group, in conjunction with the Centre for the Americas and The Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast, invite you to an online international seminar series examining the complex relationship between race, class and policing in the Americas.
Previous Events
Whistleblowing Nation with Prof. Hannah Gurman, NYU Gallatin, Monday 18th November, 2019 6.30pm 244 Greene Street 1st Fl
NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar is delighted to welcome NYU Gallatin’s Hannah Gurman to talk about her current research on Monday 18th November at 6.30pm in an event titled “Whistleblowing Nation: The Past, Present, and Future of U.S. National Security Disclosures and the Cult of State Secrecy.” This will take place in the Event Space (1st floor) of 244 Greene Street.
With the latest impeachment scandal, U.S. national security whistleblowing continues to make headlines around the world. Although the Ukraine whistleblowers captivate political and public attention, the longer history of the phenomenon remains untold.
Whistleblowing Nation: The History of National Security Disclosures, edited by Kaeten Mistry and Hannah Gurman (Columbia University Press, Spring 2020), presents the first comprehensive exploration of national security whistleblowing and state secrecy from the World War I era to the present. With a wide interdisciplinary lens, it challenges reductive characterizations of whistleblowers as heroes or traitors and rejects the notion that secrecy represents a simple choice between civil liberty and safety.
In this seminar, Hannah Gurman will share insights from the project, reflections on the challenges of researching and writing about national security whistleblowing, and connections between the history of the phenomenon and its role in U.S. and global politics today.
There will be snacks, refreshments and discussion! This event is free and open to the public.
Speaker Bio: Hannah Gurman is a historian of the United States and Clinical Associate Professor at NYU Gallatin. She teaches broadly in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies as well as more specialized courses in US foreign relations and national security. Her research focuses on the relationship between political struggles over US empire and American democracy. Her book, The Dissent Papers: The Voices of Diplomats in the Cold War and Beyond, was published in 2012 by Columbia University Press. She is also editor of Hearts and Minds: A People’s History of Counterinsurgency (The New Press, 2013). Her current research project examines the history of national-security whistleblowing in the long twentieth century. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, Diplomatic History, and The Journal of Contemporary History, as well as The Washington Post, The Nation, and Salon. In 2017, Gurman received a two-year grant from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council to research the history of US national-security whistleblowing.
For more details on any of the above, please contact Emily Foister (emf387@nyu.edu) or Patrick Deer (patrick.deer@nyu.edu)
Since its formation in 2013 The NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar Research Collaborative https://wp.nyu.edu/culturesofwar/ has aimed to contribute to the debates around war culture and to produce concrete outcomes for post-war cultural policies which bridge the divides between academia, veterans, the military, activists, writers and creative artists in today’s challenging global climate.
The Sentence of War with Inder Comar, Monday 21st October, 2019 at 7pm in The Event Space at 244 Greene Street
Resisting Policing Today: Critical Perspectives on Militarization – Friday 27th September, 2019, 6:30pm The Event Space 244 Greene Street
Cold War Nostalgia Film Screening of Dr Strangelove, 6pm on Tuesday 17th September, 2019 at The Event Space 244 Greene Street
Please join NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar research group next week for our first meeting of the new academic year, a Cold War Nostalgia Screening of Stanley Kubrick’s paranoid and prescient comic masterpiece Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Followed by discussion and refreshments.
For more details on any of the above, please contact Emily Foister (emf387@nyu.edu) or Patrick Deer (patrick.deer@nyu.edu)
Since its formation in 2013 The NYU Cultures of War and the Postwar Research Collaborative has aimed to contribute to the debates around war culture and to produce concrete outcomes for post-war cultural policies which bridge the divides between academia, veterans, the military, activists, writers and creative artists in today’s challenging global climate.
Remembering Fallujah: : A Screening of Le Parfum d’Irak (2018) & Discussion, Tues 30 April, 2019 6.30pm
