Lecture | Online Book Talk
Online Book Talk 'The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir' by Dr. Saiba Varma
- Date
- Monday 7 June 2021
- Time
- Location
- Online
Dr. Saiba Varma (University of California, San Diego) will introduce her new book: The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir (Duke University Press 2020).
Dr. Aparna Nair (University of Oklahoma-Norman), Dr. Radhika Gupta (Leiden University) and Dr. Annemarie Samuels (Leiden University) will act as discussants.
This event is co-organized by the Leiden Institute of Area Studies, and the Asia Research Cluster and ERC Globalizing Palliative Care project at the Leiden University Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology.
Date, time and registration
Date: Monday 7 June 2021
Time: 17.30-19.00 CET (Leiden time)
Other time zones:
8.30 AM -10.00 AM Pacific Daylight Time (PDT)
11.30 AM - 01.00 PM Eastern Standard Time (EST)
9.00 PM - 10.30 PM Indian Standard Time (IST)
Where: Online, the zoom-link will be sent to registered participants several hours before the seminar.
Registration: attendance is free of charge, but please register here.
The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir
In The Occupied Clinic, Saiba Varma explores the psychological, ontological, and political entanglements between medicine and violence in Indian-controlled Kashmir—the world's most densely militarized place. Into a long history of occupations, insurgencies, suppressions, natural disasters, and a crisis of public health infrastructure come interventions in human distress, especially those of doctors and humanitarians, who struggle against an epidemic: more than sixty percent of the civilian population suffers from depression, anxiety, PTSD, or acute stress. Drawing on encounters between medical providers and patients in an array of settings, Varma reveals how colonization is embodied and how overlapping state practices of care and violence create disorienting worlds for doctors and patients alike. Varma shows how occupation creates worlds of disrupted meaning in which clinical life is connected to political disorder, subverting biomedical neutrality, ethics, and processes of care in profound ways. By highlighting the imbrications between humanitarianism and militarism and between care and violence, Varma theorizes care not as a redemptive practice, but as a fraught sphere of action that is never quite what it seems.
