Of bats and bodies: methods for reading and writing embodiment

Dyvik, Synne L

doi:10.4324/9781315197678-5

Cited by 6 publications

(17 citation statements)

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“…A guiding ethic of this work has been making people central to the study of war and its attendant logics and practices. Understanding war through people's "variable compositions, emotions, and experiences" (Dyvik, 2016: 56) entails an analytical focus on those things that are encompassed by concepts such as embodiment, emotion and corporeality (Sylvester, 2013;Parashar, 2013;McSorely, 2013;Wilcox, 2015;Dyvik, 2016;Parashar, 2013;Åhäll and Gregory, 2015).…”

Section: Missing Makers In War Security and International Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

War craft: The embodied politics of making war

Tidy

2019

Security Dialogue

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https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ War Craft: The embodied politics of making war This article makes the case for examining war from a 'making point of view' (Bunn, 2011). Makers and their material production of and for war have been neglected in our accounts of war, security and international relations. An attention to processes of making for war can reveal important things about how these international processes are lived and produced at the level of the body. The article focuses on the particular phenomena of martial craft labour-the recreational making of 'stuff', including hats and pillowcases, by civilians for soldiers. To explore embodiment within this social site an ethnographic method is outlined that enables the reading of objects as embodied texts, the observation of others in processes of making, and the undertaking of making by the researcher. Analysing embodied registers of aesthetic expression and the social values that attend such crafting for war reveals how this making is a space through which intimate embodied, emotional circulations undertake work for liberal state and military-institutional logics and objectives, obscure violence, normalise war and produce the military as an abstract social cause. Beyond the immediate empirical focus of this article a much wider political entanglement of violence, embodiment and material production necessitates a concerted research agenda. Suicide Vest: Component part of suicide vest. This element comprises the handmade empty vest made out of dark green fabric which has been hand stitched and one side sewn to create a compartment to place objects in. Hole created in the centre to place head through. Single strap sewn at the four corners of the base of the vest. One side of the vest has been cut open.

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Section: Missing Makers In War Security and International Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

War craft: The embodied politics of making war

Tidy

2019

Security Dialogue

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“…In questioning traditional modes of academic 'understanding' and knowledge production, my intention is certainly not to suggest that all such efforts at understanding are fundamentally flawed and prone to misrepresentations. Indeed, other authors have strongly critiqued the assumption that an 'impossibility' of understanding military experiences generally, or war in particular, prevents any non-military person from intelligibly discussing such matters (Dyvik, 2016;MacLeish, 2016). MacLeish (2016), for instance, writes that "Americans, military and civilian alike, insist that only those who have been to war 'really know' what it is like, and we often take this presumption to mean that only those who have been to war are qualified to comment on it" (p. 228).…”

Section: Researching Understanding and Representing Veterans' Lives:mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet, certain elements of veterans' experiences seem to resist understanding and academic interpretation in ways that make communicating these experiences to a wider public profoundly difficult (Dyvik, 2016). Claiming glibly to have 'understood' veterans' experiences without acknowledging this difficulty might therefore seem a fairly reliable way of reproducing misunderstandings of veterans' lives.…”

Section: Researching Understanding and Representing Veterans' Lives:mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Eric suggested to me in a later email, "It's a quagmire because knowing isn't understanding from my point of view, purely because you cannot 'feel' what it's like to have to live it." A number of papers in the recent CMS special issue on embodiment address this particular quagmire (Baker, 2016;Bulmer & Jackson, 2016;Dyvik, 2016). In particular, Eric's words resonate with Harari's (2009) notion of 'flesh witnessing' discussed by Dyvik (2016); without which meaningful communication of an experience is inhibited.…”

Section: Researching Understanding and Representing Veterans' Lives:mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following Baker et al (2016) and Bulmer and Jackson (2016), this paper also utilises 'conversation' as methodology by drawing on excerpts from a recent recorded conversation between the first and second authors regarding the purpose and practice of veterans' research. Finally, a growing literature on reflexivity in critical military studies (e.g., Dyvik, 2016;Macleish, 2016) provides further resources with which to highlight commonalities between my own and others' experiences of conducting research with veterans.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reflections on being a civilian researcher in an ex-military world: expanding horizons?

Caddick

Cooper

Smith

2017

Critical Military Studies

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This paper provides a series of critical reflections on the tensions involved in researching the lives of military veterans. In particular, tensions arising when civilian researchers attempt to speak on behalf of veterans, combined with problematic attempts to achieve an academic 'understanding' of veterans' lives generate concerns regarding the potential misrepresentation of their unique experiences. Following recent examples in critical military studies, these issues are brought to the fore through dialogue and critical debate with colleagues and research participants. The paper first introduces a theoretical backdrop to the tensions being debated. Following Gadamer, the concept of 'horizons of understanding' is then introduced to suggest how we might usefully consider and addresses these tensions. Horizons comprise that which we are able to understand based on prior knowing. It is argued that 'dialogical' research constitutes one possible means of expanding our horizons in work with veterans. Challenges to dialogical research are discussed in light of prevailing conditions within and beyond neoliberal academia, before concluding with practical suggestions of how dialogical research might generate more productive and responsible research with military veterans.

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Interviewing for Research on Languages and War

Baker

2019

The Palgrave Handbook of Languages and Conflict

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Every participant in war encounters war through its languages. Languages are the basic ingredients of many of the sights and soundscapes of war, whether troops and civilians encounter them as temporary sojourners in a foreign territory or whether war is taking place on soil they regard as home: from the slang and patois with which foreign soldiers have learned to communicate with local civilians to go about the business of everyday life, to the 'weaponization' (Rafael 2012) of language through counter-insurgency and interrogation, to the impressions that the very perceptibility of linguistic difference in itself can leave on individuals' experiences of war -consider how often the adhan or Islamic call to prayer, in Arabic, became 'the most striking and memorable non-weapon-related sound' for so many coalition soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan during the War on Terror (Daughtry 2015: 58), or how the designers of simulated environments on military training ranges commonly use foreign languages, signs and scripts to communicate the practical and symbolic implications of linguistic difference to troops before they deploy (peacekeepers in Bosnia who did not read Cyrillic script, for instance, could not count on being able to read place names from all road signs).In certain wars, especially ethnopolitical conflicts such as the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and their aftermath, the matter of which languages are present or absent, and in what form, is part of the war itself: an armed force taking control of territory and claiming it as part of a historical national homeland, to the exclusion of competing claims, will strengthen its claim by driving out the language(s) as well as the individual members of the group(s) it considers a minority, while an army of occupation pursuing irredentist war aims, like Italy occupying the Julian Alps in 1915-17, will likewise impose its national language across public space in extending the power of the occupying state and assimilating those minorities who remain under its authority (Svoljšak 2012). Such instances of language as war, not just language in war, are ruptures in the very fabric of everyday life for inhabitants of the region, and symbolic politics that foreign interveners, during their involvement in the conflict, may or may not strive to understand.Most participants in war have also encountered war through the mediations of meaning between languages (written translation and spoken interpreting) that occur at every stage of planning, warfighting and peacemaking yet until recently went largely unnoticed in the wider study of war. Even in wars where troops have not been deployed abroad and the languages spoken by each side are the same, experiences of war raise the question of 'translation' between military and civilian registers and vocabularies: indeed, they pose the thorny literary question of whether embodied wartime experiences can be adequately 'translated' at all through language that conveys them to readers and listeners who do not have the same embodied memories...

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Of bats and bodies: methods for reading and writing embodiment

Abstract: Article (Accepted Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Dyvik, Synne L (2016) Of bats and bodies: methods for reading and writing embodiment. Critical Military Studies, 2 (

Cited by 6 publications

References 10 publications

War craft: The embodied politics of making war

War craft: The embodied politics of making war

Reflections on being a civilian researcher in an ex-military world: expanding horizons?

Interviewing for Research on Languages and War

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