War and the Body invites proposals that seek to explore the embodied history of war as well as recent transformations in warfare. Through what practices, techniques and metaphors has war historically occupied various bodies? From advanced warfighters to private military contractors, child soldiering to ethnic cleansing, is war assuming predatory new embodied formations? To what extent is war deterritorialized and brought home through bodily practices such as militarized leisure and fashion, security and surveillant assemblages? How do bodies bear witness to the histories and transformative power of war through representations of bodily violence and corporeal memorializations?

Recognizing the growing interest in the embodiment of human life and social action across the humanities and social sciences, War and the Body aims to bring together international scholars and researchers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and perspectives who share a common thematic concern with the intertwining of war and the body. As such, it acknowledges the importance of the body as an increasingly productive site for rethinking and retooling the historical and sociological imaginations. Empirical analyses and theoretical contributions are welcome.

Anticipated questions and topics may include, but are not limited to: • How are military principles and values inculcated, and resisted, in civilian bodies? • How are war and political violence lived and experienced through the body? • What bodies does war traverse, inscribe, produce? • Bodies and weaponry • War and human vulnerability • Corporeal aftermaths, memorializations and mourning • Representing war and the body: cinema, literature, documentary, photography, new media • Cultural histories of war and embodiment • The body politic: wounded nations, national traumas • The militarization of human sensation

Please note that there is also an exhibition running in tandem with the conference. Click here for more details