Monday, October 19, 2015
4 p.m.
Joukowsky Forum
Lee Ann Fujii will discuss her current book in-progress on violent display. What explains violent display? Collective, coordinated efforts to stage violence for effect. The book examines instances of violent display from diverse contexts: the Bosnian war, the Rwandan genocide, and the Jim Crow south. Fujii argues that the power of violent display is its ability to pull all comers into the show, by offering a role to everyone and everyone to a role. In so doing, these displays rewrite known categories, reorder existing hierarchies, and establish violence as the basis for claiming membership in the dominant group. The book is based on primary sources, interviews, newspapers, and memoirs.
Lee Ann Fujii is an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto.
Her research interests include political violence, ethnicity and race, African politics (especially Rwanda and the Great Lakes), and field methods. She is the author of Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Cornell University Press, 2009) and is currently researching her second book, which is on local involvement in violence in three very different sites of killing (Bosnia, Rwanda, and the United States).
Her articles have appeared in Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Peace Research, and Qualitative Research, among other venues. Her work has been supported by SSHRC, the United States Institute of Peace, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Fulbright, NCEEER, and the Russell Sage Foundation.