Description
War, health, medicine and care intersect in complex ways. Spurred in-part by the proliferation and dispersion of war and war-like violence in the 21st century, this panel will explore growing interest in science and social science in war injury and war care in recent years. In contrast to operational and logistical readings of the battlefield, in which attention to technical and tactical details often evades the how bodies are broken, made sick or killed, each of papers excavates the battlefield as a site and medium through which war can be read as series of decisions and designs in which casualties are not simply an effect – but central in the structure and infrastructures of warfare. Touching on the calibration of force, post conflict health services, sexual violence, and rehabilitation practices, the panel explores diverse practices though which through which bodies and lives are lost and regained, saved and severed, amended, extended and irreparably altered. Orientated around the materiality and metaphor of wounds, this panel considers war not from its causes but its signature consequences: injury, maiming and killing. In so doing, it articulates 'war care' as a framework for a conversation around new ways to think about the power of war and (para)military violence not only to destroy health infrastructures and subjectivities of care but also to be generative of them.
