Fieldnotes from Kashmir: Repression and Resistance

Suchitra Vijayan Inshah Malik Michael Busch

Introducing the Warscapes Public Lecture Series
War does not exist in a vacuum. At Warscapes, we work to move past a void within mainstream culture in the depiction of people and places experiencing violence. The Warscapes Public Lecture Series was created to offer impactful events featuring thoughtful, well-contextualized, provocative and rigorous perspectives on contemporary crises, elevating the debate.

The first event in the 2015 Series - Fieldnotes from Kashmir; Repression & Resistance, featuring Suchitra Vijayan and Inshah Malik, and moderated by Michael K. Busch - played to a great New York City crowd the evening of February 25th. Suchitra, a writer and photographer engaged in her long-term Borderlands multimedia project across the Indian frontier, and Inshah, a writer and activist working on issues of gender and agency, represent a new generation of scholars, bringing razor-sharp insights and imagery from the long durée of the Kashmir conflict. The video, which presents the event in full, was produced by the Bronx Documentary Center.

About the Participants
Emerging as an important voice in the Kashmiri community, Inshah Malik is a poet, writer, activist and an academic working on issues of Militarism, Human Rights, Gender and Political theory. She completed her MA and MPhil in social work at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India. She is presently working on her doctoral thesis, Political Struggles, Agency and Muslim Women; A study of the resistance movement in Kashmir at Center for Comparative Politics and Political theory, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. For her activism, she has been mentioned in the Christian Science Monitor and has published writings with journals such as Seminar magazine and others. Currently, Inshah is a visiting International Fox Fellow at Yale University. Some of her research was published as a book, Impact of Ongoing Conflict on Muslim Women in Kashmir (Lambert Academic Publishing). Read her work here: "Raped Twice: Marriage and Memory Assaulted Too"; "Kashmiris on a Different Road: Anti-Islam film, protests and beyond"; and
"Kashmiri Women Stand For ‘Peace’?

Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer, lawyer and a political theorist. She studied law, political science and international relations, and was trained as a barrister-at-law. She regularly writes about war, conflict, politics, literature and photography. Her work looks at theories of violence, war and human nature. She previously worked for the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia and Rwanda. She co-founded and was the legal director for Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo. At Yale, she worked on researching and documenting stories along the contentious Durand Line. She was embedded with the ISAF forces (172 Infantry Brigade) in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, conducting research on key kinetic terrains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Suchitra is also a bonafide trouble maker. She backpacked through Sudan in 2009, had her first encounter with tear gas in Nilin, Palestine, and left Egypt because the revolution took too long to materialize. She is currently working on her longer term research project, “Borderlands,” traveling the whole of India’s borders. Some of her work includes: "Bearing Literary Witness"; "Remembering Haiti: Four Years After the Earthquake"; "Military Justice in a Political Season?"; and the Carnegie Council Talk on Citizenship, Identity, and Conflict in South Asia’s Borderlands.
 
Michael K. Busch is a writer, researcher, and born-and-bred New Yorker. He serves as senior editor for Warscapes, is research associate at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, and is associate director of the Office of Student Success at The City College of New York, where he also teaches in the departments of political science, international studies, and the master’s program in international relations. In his spare time, Michael is working on his doctoral thesis in political economy - a project focusing on the intersections and relationships between transnational illicit economic actors and the nation-state. In his previous lives, Michael taught elementary school in the Bronx as a New York City Teaching Fellow while earning a Master’s of Science in Education, then later taught middle school in Harlem, and currently sits on the board of advisers for a new alternative high school opening this coming year in the South Bronx. He graduated from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland with degrees in Philosophy and the History of Mathematics and Science, worked for the Harvard Institute for International Development, studied in Guatemala, and briefly labored as a farmhand in El Salvador. Michael has travelled extensively through Central and South America, Eastern Europe, parts of Africa and the Middle East. He’s currently plotting his next moves in a grand scheme to visit every major league baseball stadium in the United States, but he’ll always come home to root for the Yankees, no matter how awful they become.

 

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