The Social Justice Institute Noted Scholars Series presents

Settler Colonialism as the Automation of Attritional Warfare: Death-disability-debility and the Making of Worlds

by Dr. Kharnita Mohamed

WHEN & WHERE
November 22nd, 12-1pm
Buchanan Tower 225 / Zoom

Please RSVP below in advance. Note this will be a hybrid talk.

Please wear a mask if you are attending this event in-person. A sandwich lunch will be served at 1pm.

Abstract

Inequality is materialised as death-disability-debility. For example, the ‘female fear factory’ (Gqola, 2021) secures gendered and queer debilitation through the use of and threat of death, and processes of disablement which facilitates heteropatriarchal dominance. Racist capitalist dominance is also secured through normalised attritional warfare that entails the wearing down of populations through death-disability-debility. Structural violence, that is, attritional warfare is sedimented by spectacular events of violence to ensure governable and docile populations. How we speak and write about settler colonial violence often evades the automation of warfare, dematerialises its deployment and consequences and, in some ways, allows the effects of violence to evaporate. In this talk, I will discuss the value of using death-disability-debility as a conceptual apparatus, that does not only count death and injury but uses the three modalities together as an analytic of injustice to offer a means to explore settler colonialism as attritional warfare.

About Kharnita Mohamed

Kharnita Mohamed lectures in Anthropology at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Her research is focused on epistemology, death, debility, disability, race and gender towards developing conceptual tools for thinking about death, disability and debility in and for the Global South. She has received the UCT Humanities Faculty’s Dean’s Teaching Award and her debut novel, Called to Song received the 2020 UCT Meritorious Book Award, and was shortlisted for the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences Fiction Award. She has co-edited the forthcoming edited volume, Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms and a Special Issue on Gender and Disability (Agenda).

Accessibility

• This will be an in-person event in Buchanan Tower. A wheelchair accessible and single-user, gender-neutral washroom is located across from the room. Otherwise, gendered washrooms are located on alternate floors in the stairwell between floors.
• The room has a capacity of approximately 40 people and will have open windows.
• Please wear a mask if you intend to attend this event. There will be masks available in the room.
• The online Zoom event will have autogenerated captions enabled.

Please include any additional access requests or questions in the RSVP form above or reply to your confirmation email.