Ronak Kapadia, “Scaling Empire: Security, Sensation, and the Queer Life of the Forever War”

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Off Campus

Community Room 
West Hollywood Public Library 
625 N. San Vicente Blvd., West Hollywood

WHAP! Lecture Series

Ronak K. Kapadia is assistant professor of gender and women’s studies and affiliated faculty in Global Asian Studies and Museum and Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is author of the forthcoming Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke UP, 2019), which examines the visionary, world-making potential of contemporary art and aesthetics in the context of ongoing US war and empire in the Greater Middle East. With Katherine McKittrick and Simone Browne, he is co-editor of the 2017 special issue of Surveillance & Society on race and surveillance. His writings appear in Asian American Literary ReviewJournal of Popular Music StudiesFeminist Formations, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, and edited volumes including: Shifting Borders: America and the Middle East/North AfricaCritical Ethnic Studies: A Reader, and With Stones in Our Hands: Reflections on Racism, Muslims and US Empire. Kapadia has begun research toward his second book project, The Downward Redistribution of Breath, which develops a critical feminist theory of healing/justice in the wilds of imperial decline.