CRTMIL Reading Salon with Omar Sirri

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https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/91078841639?pwd=WFZ0UUdNRUp4NS96ZkFGWS9GdjBqQT09

Please join us for a reading salon with Omar Sirri, Ph.D candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, to discuss his in-progress work, “Performing Checkpoints, Effecting the State: Ethnographic Reflections from Baghdad.” This is a participatory event and all are welcome! Please RSVP to anath@ucdavis.edu for the precirculated reading. Comment on paper by Dr. Dena Al-Adeeb, visiting scholar at UC Davis.

Paper Abstract:

"This paper explores the effects produced by urban checkpoints in contemporary Baghdad. For years lamented by residents and state security personnel alike as being ineffective architectures of security, checkpoints remain implicated in effecting the state in Iraq’s capital city. I draw on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2017 and 2019, including two months of observation at a federal police checkpoint in the district of Karada, east and south of the Tigris River. Putting into further conversation scholarship on performativity with the critical study of security, I suggest that both the theatrical and citational nature of checkpoint practices matter for how the state comes to be. Baghdad’s checkpoints help show how even through what I call ‘performative security breakdown,’ checkpoint routines and practices—and the materials that bolster them—are still critical to conjuring the entity deemed responsible for their failure."

For more information please contact: anath@ucdavis.edu
Event sponsored by: Critical Militarization, Policing, and Security Studies Cluster
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