CUSAS Talk with Professor Adia Benton (Northwestern University)

Professor Adia Benton (Northwestern University)The Words are Maps: On War, Extremism and Ebola under Empire

In the Imperial War Museum’s 2016 exhibit, “Fighting Extremes: From Ebola to ISIS,” visitors are invited to consider the scope of contemporary military intervention--from humanitarian aid to combat--while also holding these forms of intervention in contradistinction to each other. In the case presented here, ‘extremes’ represents the opposite ends of interventional and ideological spectra, united only by the British military’s involvement. Starting with the semantic map created for and featured in the exhibit, I trace, examine and analyze the tensions and organizational logics governing this schematic split into ‘extremes’ while attending to its overlaps and intersections in the 2014-5 ‘fight’ against pandemic Ebola in Sierra Leone.

 

Adia Benton is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Her work focuses on global health, biomedicine, development/humanitarianism, and professional sports as well as inequalities in distributions and the politics of care in settings “socialized” for scarcity.

Online, Zoom registration link: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJArdO-vqDspHdLRtQwPH32hf52hnfsCf5S8

For more information, contact cusas@socanth.cam.ac.uk