This panel is the fifth in the series’ Methodologies in Critical Terrorism Studies: Bridging Disciplinary Gaps and Centring Missing Voices’.
11 September 2001 and the unfolding ‘war on terror’ continues to be the predominant starting point for scholarship on terrorism and countering terrorism (Martini, Ford and Jackson, 2020). However, an uncritical focus on this geopolitical moment foregrounds ‘the experience of the (white) American subject, who has suddenly and graphically discovered its own vulnerability’ (Thobani, 2007). Paying attention to the spatial and temporal context of critical events can shift our understanding of the constructions of narratives of necessity and legitimacy (Jarvis, 2009). Feminist and queer approaches do this by focusing on how forms of global governance are bolstered within intimate spaces of the everyday. Such approaches help to interrogate essentialist binaries between Global North and Global South states and present methods to understand authoritarian tools as shared globally and based upon the oppression of marginalised communities.
This seminar looks to how feminist and queer approaches that shift away from the state as the central actor are of particular value to rethinking terrorism and counter terrorism work. It will ask how we can build forms of critical enquiry that transverse global rifts and help to disrupt normative assumptions of mainstream thinking on terrorism. This session also aims to bring together conversation on how our scholarship on terrorism is shaped through the different spatial, temporal and political locations we find ourselves in as scholars.
Chair: Dr Alice Finden
Panellists:
Dr Jennifer P Eggert, Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Communities (JLI) and the University of Leeds
Professor C Heike Schotten, University of Massachusetts
Discussant:
Professor Laura Sjoberg, Royal Holloway University