Mapping Injury
Mapping Injury: The embodied, sociocultural, and material sites of political emergence, is a five-year research project, selected for the European Research Council Advanced, funded by the UKRI Frontier Research Grant, as part of the Horizon Europe Guarantee.
Led by Professor Vivienne Jabri, the project investigates ‘injury’ in its multiple iterations and manifestations and its impact on political agency and global mechanisms of response. Using case-studies in the Global South, including Colombia, Lebanon, Nigeria and South Africa, and reflecting injuries to bodies, lived spaces, infrastructures, environments and other forms, the project offers a new, interdisciplinary and relational understanding that will contribute to global discourses and practices relating to the international politics of justice.
Image credit: Max (2023)
Aims
The project aims to reveal:
1) the topographies of injury and the global entanglements implicated in their production;
2) the processes whereby injury enters political discourses;
3) the institutional responses, both domestic and international, relating to repair and redress;
4) the implications, for theory, methodology, and impact, of a project that offers an innovative approach to the politics of global justice.
Methods
The project is interdisciplinary in its conceptualisation and methodology, tracing injury as it is articulated and experienced by populations, how such experiences impact on expressions of political agency and mechanisms of response at local, national, regional, and international levels. Seeking to develop an innovative approach to the politics of global justice, and conducting research at specific sites, the project uses a combination of ethnographic, archival, documentary/textual, and visual methods in offering an analytic and a theorisation that captures the embodied, sociocultural, political and material manifestations of injury and its impact.
Visual methods are a core component of the project and will incorporate material from each of our research sites, including newly commissioned artworks. A project exhibition, one of the outputs, is scheduled to take place in 2027/28.
Project Team
Research Associate in the Department of War Studies
Research Associate in the Department of War Studies
Curator of Visual Materials for the project, 'Mapping Injury'
Research Associate in the Department of War Studies
Professor of International Politics
Research Associate in the Department of War Studies
The publication feed is not currently available.
Conferences
Injury, Global Justice, and the Political
The Mapping Injury project hosted a two-day interdisciplinary symposium on the 6th and 7th of September 2024, bringing together scholars and artists to deliberate the question of injury, its multiple sites, and the social, political, and legal mechanisms of repair and redress. The symposium explored the work of conceptualisation, highlighting the ‘family resemblances’ of concepts related to injury, including ‘trauma’, ‘harm’, ‘depletion’, ‘precarity’. These are concepts that relate to war, but they also point to wider contexts of violence, exclusion, dispossession, displacement, and discriminatory practices that take place in the routine of the everyday.
Speakers considered injury as a product of war and of these wider practices; for example, the activities of extractive industries that harm environments and lived habitats, mal-government and the fracturing of public infrastructures, speech and institutionalised practices that reproduce hierarchies of worth. Such practices have deep roots in colonial violence and dispossession, and they continue to define relations globally. Thought-provoking sessions were provided by our guests from the world of art practice, including Khalil Joreige from Lebanon, Ndidi Dike from Nigeria, and London based curator Tally de Orellana.
For the full symposium programme, see https://www.kcl.ac.uk/warstudies/assets/injury-global-justice-and-the-political-symposium-programme.pdf.
For a blogpost on the symposium, see https://www.mappinginjury.org/blog/symposium.
7th Global International Studies Conference of the World International Studies Committee (WISC): ‘International Relations in a World of Flux: Understanding Continuity, Change and Contestation’, University of Warsaw, Poland, 24-26 July 2024
Panel: To Look or Not to Look: Participation, Visual Agency, and Global Injustices
This panel examines the mechanisms through which the visual advances the understanding of harm, injury, and justice at various sites of political emergence in the Global South, proposing a broad definition of ‘the visual’ which includes art, mapping practices, and documentaries. By bringing together visual methodologies to examine the organisation and emergence of public agency at different sites in the Global South, this panel argues that visual approaches to lived experiences of injury mediate the mobilisation of public agency, make injustices legible, and are paramount to mapping a route towards global justice.
Paper titles:
Madonna Kalousian, The Beirut Port Explosion: Ruination, Resistance, and Aesthetics of Recovery
Naluwembe Binaisa, Art, Activism and Injustice: Mapping the Territory in the Niger Delta
Cecile Bourne-Farrell, Curating Art and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: SUD2017
Jennifer Bates, ‘Winds of Blood:’ indigenous visual representations of wind energy in Colombia’s La Guajira region
Project Team
Research Associate in the Department of War Studies
Research Associate in the Department of War Studies
Curator of Visual Materials for the project, 'Mapping Injury'
Research Associate in the Department of War Studies
Professor of International Politics
Research Associate in the Department of War Studies
The publication feed is not currently available.
Conferences
Injury, Global Justice, and the Political
The Mapping Injury project hosted a two-day interdisciplinary symposium on the 6th and 7th of September 2024, bringing together scholars and artists to deliberate the question of injury, its multiple sites, and the social, political, and legal mechanisms of repair and redress. The symposium explored the work of conceptualisation, highlighting the ‘family resemblances’ of concepts related to injury, including ‘trauma’, ‘harm’, ‘depletion’, ‘precarity’. These are concepts that relate to war, but they also point to wider contexts of violence, exclusion, dispossession, displacement, and discriminatory practices that take place in the routine of the everyday.
Speakers considered injury as a product of war and of these wider practices; for example, the activities of extractive industries that harm environments and lived habitats, mal-government and the fracturing of public infrastructures, speech and institutionalised practices that reproduce hierarchies of worth. Such practices have deep roots in colonial violence and dispossession, and they continue to define relations globally. Thought-provoking sessions were provided by our guests from the world of art practice, including Khalil Joreige from Lebanon, Ndidi Dike from Nigeria, and London based curator Tally de Orellana.
For the full symposium programme, see https://www.kcl.ac.uk/warstudies/assets/injury-global-justice-and-the-political-symposium-programme.pdf.
For a blogpost on the symposium, see https://www.mappinginjury.org/blog/symposium.
7th Global International Studies Conference of the World International Studies Committee (WISC): ‘International Relations in a World of Flux: Understanding Continuity, Change and Contestation’, University of Warsaw, Poland, 24-26 July 2024
Panel: To Look or Not to Look: Participation, Visual Agency, and Global Injustices
This panel examines the mechanisms through which the visual advances the understanding of harm, injury, and justice at various sites of political emergence in the Global South, proposing a broad definition of ‘the visual’ which includes art, mapping practices, and documentaries. By bringing together visual methodologies to examine the organisation and emergence of public agency at different sites in the Global South, this panel argues that visual approaches to lived experiences of injury mediate the mobilisation of public agency, make injustices legible, and are paramount to mapping a route towards global justice.
Paper titles:
Madonna Kalousian, The Beirut Port Explosion: Ruination, Resistance, and Aesthetics of Recovery
Naluwembe Binaisa, Art, Activism and Injustice: Mapping the Territory in the Niger Delta
Cecile Bourne-Farrell, Curating Art and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: SUD2017
Jennifer Bates, ‘Winds of Blood:’ indigenous visual representations of wind energy in Colombia’s La Guajira region
Principal Investigator
Professor of International Politics