INJURY: Mapping injury: the embodied, socio-cultural and material sites of political emergence
Lead Research Organisation:
King's College London
Department Name: War Studies
Abstract
The concept of injury has multiple iterations and manifestations. It can point to injured bodies as casualties of war. It can refer to injured pride or humiliation, as products of discriminatory practices and 'hate speech'. It can apply to the destruction of habitats and environments, human actions that produce immediate and long-term suffering. We often confine the concept to casualties of war, yet these other forms can be as devastating to human life and well-being, their
impact manifest well beyond their moment of occurrence. If we define injury in embodied, socio-cultural, and sociomaterial terms, as this project intends, we can trace its impact politically; in terms of the emergence and expression of political agency and the form and directionality such agency takes, and in terms of how the discursive and institutional structures designed to variously mitigate, govern, and repair are navigated and mobilised. The project places the analytical and empirical lens on injury, with the aim of providing a new theorisation that, for the first time, uses a relational understanding that integrates the intersection of embodied experience, with socio-cultural and socio-material
dynamics. Using case studies based in the global south, and reflecting injuries to bodies, lived spaces, infrastructures, and habitats, the project's objectives seek to reveal: 1) the topographies of injury and the global entanglements
implicated in their production; 2) the processes whereby injury enters political discourse and contestation; 3) the structures that govern the impact of injury normatively and politically; and 4) the ethical implications of the theorisation and empirical investigation proposed. The original contribution of the project derives from its theorisation, based as it is on a relational epistemology and ontology, and its empirical investigation, tracing the path between injury and the political, drawing on qualitative methods (based on textual, oral, and visual sources).
impact manifest well beyond their moment of occurrence. If we define injury in embodied, socio-cultural, and sociomaterial terms, as this project intends, we can trace its impact politically; in terms of the emergence and expression of political agency and the form and directionality such agency takes, and in terms of how the discursive and institutional structures designed to variously mitigate, govern, and repair are navigated and mobilised. The project places the analytical and empirical lens on injury, with the aim of providing a new theorisation that, for the first time, uses a relational understanding that integrates the intersection of embodied experience, with socio-cultural and socio-material
dynamics. Using case studies based in the global south, and reflecting injuries to bodies, lived spaces, infrastructures, and habitats, the project's objectives seek to reveal: 1) the topographies of injury and the global entanglements
implicated in their production; 2) the processes whereby injury enters political discourse and contestation; 3) the structures that govern the impact of injury normatively and politically; and 4) the ethical implications of the theorisation and empirical investigation proposed. The original contribution of the project derives from its theorisation, based as it is on a relational epistemology and ontology, and its empirical investigation, tracing the path between injury and the political, drawing on qualitative methods (based on textual, oral, and visual sources).
Organisations
People |
ORCID iD |
| Vivienne Jabri (Principal Investigator) |
Publications
Jabri, Vivienne
(2024)
War and Aesthetics: Art, Technology, and the Futures of Warfare
Jabri, Vivienne
(2025)
Worlds in Conflict: War and the Limits of Politics (MIT Press, November 2025).
| Title | Online exhibition |
| Description | Mapping Injury: Colonial Legacies is an online exhibition that emerged from the project, Injury. It was researched by four postdoctoral research associated working on the project, including Hannah Goose (on South Africa); Jennifer Bates (Colombia), Madonna Kalousian (Lebanon), and Naluwembe Binaisa (Nigeria). The online exhibition can be found at https://www.mappinginjury.org/exhibition. |
| Type Of Art | Artefact (including digital) |
| Year Produced | 2024 |
| Impact | The Amin impact is pedagogical. It reveals, as the title implies, the colonial legacies that underpin injury in the global; south, from the legacies of apartheid in South Africa, to the sectarian system of government in Lebanon and practices of intervention relating to the division of the population, to the configurations, juridical and political, of the indigenous subject in Colombia, to the activities of the extractive industries and environmental destruction in the Niger Delta in Nigeria and the political and juridical consequences of such activities. The exhibition reveals the value of the documentary and the visual in qualitative research, methods of selection in the archives, and ways of curating an online exhibition available to researchers, research participants, and the public. |
| URL | https://www.mappinginjury.org/exhibition |
| Description | 1) Conceptual and theoretical work relating injury to war and non-war activities that harm populations. Developing a conceptual framework precisely geared to conducting empirical research on injury, political agency, and mechanisms of repair and redress. To see how the tools of understanding of war as injurious might be utilised to understand injury in its widest sense (e.g. related to environmental destruction, population displacement, the destruction of lived spaces and habitats, infrastructures and governing practices, cross-generational trauma), see forthcoming book, Jabri, Vivienne, Worlds in Conflict: War and the Limits of Politics (MIT Press). 2) Archival research, now publicly available, on the colonial legacies of injury in the global south. See https://www.mappinginjury.org/exhibition. 3) Configurations of the subject of injury, sociopolitically and legally. This will be further reported in the next period. 4) Ongoing ethnographic work and visual methods will be reported in the next reporting period. |
| Exploitation Route | It is critical to the project that academics and practitioners concerned with issues of global justice have access to the results of the project once completed. Also of core target interest are researchers, artists, and documentary filmmakers. |
| Sectors | Education Environment Government Democracy and Justice Culture Heritage Museums and Collections Security and Diplomacy |
| Description | The project is not finished. Impact is therefore difficult to measure precisely. nevertheless, we have made available our publicly facing research through a new project website, and a new online exhibition, as other sections have highlighted. In relation to publications, again, these are ongoing. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2024 |
| Sector | Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections,Security and Diplomacy,Other |
| Impact Types | Cultural Societal |
| Description | Have a dedicated project website that enables the posting of project related blogs, activities, the project online exhibition, Mapping Injury: Colonial Legacies, details on project related publications., and events. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The project website is essential for communicating activities, outputs, ongoing projects, exhibitions, methods, and details of project related events. It is research-based, and public facing, enabling project participants internationally to engage with the project. It is also essential in the recruitment of project participants, for ethnographic research and other qualitative research with policy-makers and practitioners. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://www.mappinginjury.org |
| Description | Invited lecture at the University of St Andrews on the subject of the project, Injury. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Local |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | The purpose of the invited lecture was to discuss the project, Injury, and its specific conceptual and methodological framing. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| Description | Invited to deliver the Manchester University Annual Peace Lecture, May 2023. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A talk or presentation |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | Invited to present the International Peace lecture (a well-established event that has in the past included authors such as Zygmunt Bowman, Naomi Chomsky, Joan Bourke, and others). The title of my lecture was "Peace, Symbolic, Material, Political". I was asked to introduce the project, Injury. This meant I could relate concepts relating to global justice, as these are being developed in the project, to questions of international conflict and peace practices. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| Description | Online Exhibition, Mapping Injury: Colonial Legacies |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The following is the purpose of the exhibition: Communities across the Global South experience harms, defined in our research project as 'injuries', due to violent conflict, and wider exploitative practices that impact lives, environments, public spaces, and infrastructures designed to meet the needs of societies. All such practices have deep roots in colonial violence and dispossession, and they continue to define relations globally. Focusing on Colombia, Lebanon, Nigeria and South Africa, the exhibition reveals cartographies of dispossession that come to be enshrined in juridical instruments of control. It shows visual and textual evidence of symbolic and administrative power evident in the government of populations through racialised and sectarian division and co-optation. The exhibition traces the intersection of colonial power and resistance, highlighting the emergence of agency and resistance in the face of colonial and apartheid institutionalised violence. It also reveals the complex global entanglements implicated, the evidence and ramifications of which remain with us to the present day. This exhibition forms part of the Mapping Injury project, based at King's College London. All visual matter is reproduced with permissions. The exhibition can be cited as follows: Mapping Injury, UKRI Horizon Europe Guarantee, King's College London, www.mappinginjury.org/exhibition. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |
| URL | https://www.mappinginjury.org/exhibition |
| Description | Opening address to the art exhibition, Conflict and Injury: The Score, You and I Both Know. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The activity related to the opening of an arts exhibition, co-curated by Vivienne Jabri and Cecile Bourne-Farrell, and primarily funded by the Stanley Johnson Hoffman Foundation, for the project, Conflict and Injury. The exhibition, The Score: You and I Both Know, showed works by the artist Corinne Silva, revealing the front-line in Sarajevo during the civil war in Bosnia. The opening address highlighted Vivienne Jabri's new award for Mapping Injury, describing the project as a major shift of the analytical and empirical lens from conflict-related 'injury' in her previous research, to an understanding that takes a wider compass where injuries are conceived in embodied, socio-cultural, and material terms. With a focus on the Global South, the address communicated the related, but major shift for research on injury, now conceived in relation to bodies, population groups, lived spaces, environments, infrastructures related to the basic needs of populations, and governing national and international institutions. The core objectives of the then new award were communicated and questions were answered relating to the project and intended future collaborations. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/score-you-and-i-both-know-exhibition |
| Description | Symposium: Injury, Global Justice, and the Political. A 2-day (6-7 September 2024) international symposium attended by 65 participants, with 14 interdisciplinary speakers. |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Other audiences |
| Results and Impact | An academic symposium that included academics and postgraduates or Early Career researchers. The symposium covered three themes related to the project, Injury, as follows: 1-Conceptual Work Is the concept, 'injury', adequate to the task of working through the devastations wrought against populations through these different practices? Some authors prefer to use the terms 'slow' or 'structural' violence, while others prefer 'harm', 'vulnerability', 'trauma', 'precarity', 'depletion', and 'fracture', to name but a few. Each of these may in turn place the lens on differences of gender, race, sexuality, class, or nation. This section of the symposium invited scholars and practitioners to consider the work of conceptualisation, and how this feeds into not just understanding, but also practices relating to reparation and other modes of redress. How are these concepts suggestive of specific conceptions of time and space, or of subjectivity and agency and relations of power globally? 2-Political Agency and the Politics of Global Justice: What is the relationship between injury, broadly defined, and the emergence of political agency? Judith Butler, for example, relates vulnerability to the politics of assembly. Mahmood Mamdani writes of the decolonised political community. How do harmed, injured, precarious, traumatised, and vulnerable communities emerge as political agents? What are the conditions of possibility for agency relating to global justice and how is it articulated? How is the subject of injury defined and configured? To what extent does the practice of defining or categorising the subject of injury play a part in governing what or who is qualified and who can speak? Spivak's 'can the subaltern speak?' is a question that continues to resonate and challenge. At the same time, 'silencing' is a governing practice that has wider manifestations. 2-Practices and Mechanisms Empirical investigations drawing on multiple methods: archival, ethnographic, visual, and oral. Presentations focused on the works of particular artists or filmmakers. Other papers covered testimonials of what is directly observed and heard at 'sites of injury' and locations of agency. Presentations also focussed on methods and their effectiveness in promoting understanding and the mobilisation of resources for populations impacted. The following papers were presented: Vivienne Jabri, King's College London, Introduction to the project and paper on "The Work of Concepts and Theories in Global Justice". Raluca Soreanu, University of Essex, "Scenes of Injury. Scenes of Listening: Notes on a Public Psychoanalysis". Karin M. Fierke, University of St Andrews, "Traumatic Injury and Transgenerational Entanglement". Zenep Gulsah Capan, University of Erfurt, "Unwritable Pasts Unwritten: Poetics of the Past and the Shadows of the Presences". Paul Witzenhausen, University of Erfurt, "The State at the Postcolonial Moment - Protected Histories of 'the Injured' and Facilities of Amelioration". P. Anh Nguyen, University of St Andrews, "Confronting 'Temporal Others': Trauma, Injury, and (In)security Across Time". Shirin Rai, School of Oriental and African Studies, "DEPLETION: The Harms of Non-recognition of Caring". Pinar Bilgin, Bilkent University, "Who Speaks Security: Edward Said and the Question of Agency". Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas, Artist Presentation 1, "Continuity in Time of Rupture, Latencies, and Stories Kept Secret". Documentary Screening, ""Huella Colonial" (Colonial Traces). Lara Montesinos Coleman, University of Sussex; and Owen Thomas, University of Exeter, "On Suffering without Injury: Making the Lived Experience of Harm Visible through Struggle". Ritu Vij, University of Aberdeen, "Passages from Subalternity to Precarity: A Revisionist Account". Gustavo Rojas Paez, Sussex University, "Historical Harm and Justice Claims in the Global South". Chaeyoung Yong, University of St Andrews, "Navigating Injury and Affective Anger in Addressing Gender Injustices". Pauline Zerla, King's College London, "Injured Landscapes: Nature as a Site of Collective Injury and Trauma". Ndidi Dike, Artist based in Nigeria, Artist Presentation 2, "Visual Global Entanglements: Extraction." Jennifer Bates, Naluwembe Binaisa, Hannah Goozee, Madonna Kalousian, Launch of Mapping Injury project, online exhibition. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2024 |