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War and Peace Studies Caucus Main Page
The War and Peace Studies Caucus will identify the analysis of violence and conflict as a primary field of study within American Studies scholarship and provide a dedicated space in which scholars interested in exploring how these issues intersect with the critical questions central to the study of American culture can share ideas, network, and collaborate to generate new directions for research and teaching. Recent scholarship that interrogates questions of transnationalism, imperialism, and borderlands studies, as well as that which seeks to historicize and explore the significance in American culture of the “War on Terror” and the on-going wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have led to much excellent work that critically engages these issues. However, scholars working on these issues often remain separated because their alignment with particular subfields and historical periods prohibits collaboration with scholars working on similar issues in other fields or with regard to other historical moments.
The War and Peace Studies Caucus will seek to bridge this gap by encouraging collaboration across subfields and historical periods to develop new directions for teaching and research regarding how issues of violence and conflict intersect with issues ranging from notions of patriotism and nationalism to the role of technology and religion in American life. We are interested in interrogating specific historical incidents, theoretical questions about violence and conflict, the relationship between the study of war and peace and other subfields in American Studies, and all other issues that allow us to critically interrogate both issues of war and peace and the larger question of the location of these issues within the American Studies project. We are particularly interested in encouraging partnerships that will lead to increased consideration of how the methodological and theoretical approaches central to the study of war and peace are useful in producing new understandings of those topics, and, concurrently, how examining those intersections will lead to innovative understandings of the historical and contemporary significance of war and peace in American culture.
Contact information:
* David Kieran, American Studies Department, The George Washington University .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
* Ed Martini, History Department, Western Michigan University, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
* Jay Mechling, American Studies Department, University of California, Davis, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Community Blog
CFP: Ecologies of War, 2010 Annual Meeting
“Ecologies of War”
That the phrase “weaponizing of culture” is now common within military doctrine reveals that, although surely in quite different ways, military analysts and strategists are interrogating the same cultural, sociological, and ecological issues as scholars within the US and abroad. Indeed, issues of cultural imperialism, ever-increasing cultural hybridity, , growing problems of resource scarcity, the threat of climate change, and other cultural and ecological issues that have emerged as increasingly significant in the twenty-first century scholarship are likewise central to current US war-doctrine—such as the US Army’s Human Terrain Systems, military interest in climate change, and contemporary counter-insurgency doctrine. These programs have emerged from attempts to both foster and manage the globally minoritized sense of planetary risk that such issues raise.
This panel will interrogate the intersections between contemporary military doctrine and the critical questions shaping scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. We will consider such topics as the global contexts of group/identity, formation, techno-militaristic reorientations of geopolitics, the uniquely twenty-first century mutations of time and space, and political commitment with particular interest in understanding how they have been contemplated and deployed within a military context and what the significance of such deployments is.
More specific questions might include:
* How are certain Humanities methods - an awareness of identity politics or social movement theory, for example - being put to work as a new “area of operation” abroad? What is at stake in such developments?
* How can we locate the “weaponizing of culture” that is becoming significant within contemporary doctrine within longer histories of US imperialism and military doctrine?
* How does military interest in crucial global issues (climate change, for example, or women’s rights) intersect with, subvert, or exploit efforts to address these by other government agencies, international organizations, or NGOs?
* How is the “weaponizing of culture” occurring both in the name of advancing the liberal representative state while in the time, perhaps, effectively destroying it?
* How does the cultural turn within military doctrine combine with other forms of “soft”- and “hard-power”—omni-surveilance, drone-war, the absolute mediatization of violence, militarized ethnographic fieldwork, etc.—relate to US planetary ambition?
Please send brief abstracts as well as brief CVs to Mike Hill (mikehill2albany.edu) by January 10, 2010.
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CFP: “‘The War of My Generation:’ Adolescent Culture and the “War on Terror”
CFP for the 2010 ASA Annual Meeting
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War and Peace Studies Caucus Networking Happy Hour
Please see below—we’d love to see everyone at the Happy Hour that we have scheduled for the Annual Meeting!
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Peace History Society’s electronic Newsletter
Please see the note below from Doug Rossinow, who can be contacted at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Dear Friends,
I am hoping to begin a couple of regular columns in the Peace History
Society’s electronic Newsletter, which I am hoping to put out twice a
year, once in the fall and once in the spring. One of these should be a
column by someone working in a peace studies program at a college or
university. If you would like to volunteer to write such a column
(probably 1-2 pages) please let me know. If you know of others who might
be interested in doing so, please feel free to pass this message on to
them and encourage them to contact me. The next Newsletter is for Fall
2009, and I hope to put it out around mid-November with the first of
these columns.
Thanks very much for your attention.
Best wishes,
Doug Rossinow
Professor and Chair
Department of History
Metropolitan State University
Saint Paul, MN
Vice-President, PHS (2009-2010)
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Welcome
Welcome to all of the new members of the War and Peace Studies Caucus!
The Caucus was the brainchild of Jay Mechling, and as Jay, Ed, and I worked to get it off the ground we hard from so many people within and outside the ASA community who had been looking for a place in which they could network on issues surroundign conflict and violence. Since our formal recognition last spring, membership has been growing—we now have over 30 members!
In order to make this the vibrant community that everyone would like it to become, I want to encourage members to use this blog area to post CFPs, issues for discussion, and other content that you think would be of interest to members. We will shortly be posting a list of panels at this years annual meeting that are related to War and Peace issues.
In addition, we have discussed hosting an informal cocktail gathering during the ASA annual meeting so that members can meet one another and network. More details will be forthcoming, and we hope you’ll be able to attend!
If you have any suggestions regarding how the caucus can become more effective in promoting the discussion of war and peace related issues, please don’t hesitate to contact one of the administrators.
Best,
Dave Kieran
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Events
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