Watson Events

Kurdish Studies have historically been side-lined within Middle East studies or reduced to the study of Kurdish nationalism. While there has been a proliferation of Kurdish studies across the US and Europe in recent years, there has been only limited engagement with Kurdish society in its complexity. The aim of the Kurdish Studies initiative is to support and contribute to critical and original Kurdish Studies that combine theoretically cutting edge and empirically grounded work as well as highlight creative approaches (films, art, literature) to the study of Kurds and Kurdish societies.

Chronicling the everyday lives and political activism of disabled veterans of Turkey’s counterinsurgency war against Kurdish guerrillas, Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey, is an ethnographic study of gender, embodiment, and nationalism in a war-torn nation. Bringing the reader into military hospitals, commemorations, political demonstrations, and veterans’ everyday spaces of care, intimacy, and activism, the book provides a historically grounded analysis of the multiple and sometimes contradictory forces that fashion veterans’ bodies, political subjectivities, and communities. Examining how veterans’ experiences of war and disability are closely linked to class, gender, and ultimately the embrace of ultranationalist right-wing politics, the work contributes to our understanding of the global rise of right-wing nationalisms and militarisms from an anthropological viewpoint.

Canceled Events
Center for Middle East Studies