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Decolonizing disasters in Kashmir

Organizer(s) University of Victoria
Date

Time

1:30pm-2:30pm PST

What happens when disaster collides with Empire? The panelists offer insights from their ethnographic research in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, a region burdened by repeated environmental catastrophes and part of the broader Kashmir dispute. Communities in Kashmir remain highly susceptible to environmental disasters or are unable to recover from them, not simply because of climate change, poor planning, or careless humanitarian interventions, as commonly insisted, but because of the ongoing conditions of coloniality that structures these domains.

The panelists argue that disaster resilience can only be achieved if structures of colonial rule are dismantled. And that foregrounding decolonization and struggles for social justice, rather than only climate change adaptation or disaster management, might help re-envision Kashmir’s forms and futures amidst environmental decline and political instability.

Speakers:

Omer Aijazi is a transdisciplinary scholar and storyteller, interested in how people imagine and claim their worlds in the wake of colonial rule and environmental ruin amid the shadows of Empire. Questioning the carceral logics of South Asia and disciplinary norms within disaster studies, his forthcoming book Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in the Borderlands (University of Pennsylvania Press) foregrounds disasters as forms of cascading violence and examines living with/in dystopia as dailiness in the disputed territory of Kashmir and its continuity with Northern Pakistan. Omer is currently a Visiting Scholar and Adjunct Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the University of Victoria. He holds a Ph.D. in critical disaster studies from the University of British Columbia.

 

Pascale Schild is a social anthropologist at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and currently a visiting scholar at the SOAS South Asia Institute in London. Focusing on the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, her research explores how disasters are governed and become (dis-)entangled with the state, politics, resistance, and vulnerability in everyday life. Her work has appeared in Citizenship Studies and Contemporary South Asia, among other journals and edited volumes. Recently, Pascale was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation mobility grant for her research project on transnational peace activism and practices of solidarity in/with the Kashmiri freedom movement in the UK. She holds a Ph.D. from the LMU Munich, Germany.

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