Dear colleagues,

I am pleased to share a call for participants with you for a workshop in Copenhagen this December on the methodological and ethical challenges of ethnographic research on soldier and veteran sociality.

With kind regards,

Sebastian
Sebastian Mohr
Assistant Professor, PhD, mag. art.
Section for Educational Sociology
Danish School of Education
Aarhus University - Campus Emdrup
Tuborgvej 164, building D, room 202
2400 Copenhagen

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Call for participants:

Warring relations: methodological and ethical challenges of ethnographic research on soldier and veteran sociality - 2-day workshop, 8th and 9th of December, 2016 in Copenhagen

Military operations since the beginning of the 1990s re-invoked scholarly interest in the effects of military culture and the experiences of war for people's individual and collective sense of identity and belonging. This scholarly interest partly arose out of a necessity to develop ways to cope and to help people with a range of physical and psychological injuries, and partly because political decision making, moral landscapes, diagnostic manuals, as well as people's ways of being together were ultimately affected by military interventions and wars since the 1990s such as the political need to properly recognize the sacrifice made by military personnel for example. Wanting to understand what these warring contexts might mean for contemporary forms of sociality, ethnographers have turned their attention towards soldiers, veterans, and their social networks since it is military personnel and their loved ones who are among those directly impacted by war and military violence - both as part of their occupational involvement as well as their personal relations. Yet while ethnographic accounts have begun to address the individual and social effects of war and military violence, the methodological as well as ethical challenges of doing ethnographic research within the settings of soldier and veteran sociality have been less so. This workshop addresses exactly these dimensions and invites scholars to take a reflective stance on research practice and ethics in order to discuss key questions of ethnographic engagements with soldiers, veterans, and their social networks.

We invite scholars working on soldier and veteran sociality in national and cultural contexts characterized by military deployment since the beginning of the 1990s. While the historical, societal as well as institutional circumstances of these contexts differ, deployed military personnel from different nations often work together within international forces and coalitions and thus share certain deployment experiences. Simultaneously, strategies for political legitimization of joint military action and war have often taken similar pathways in the various nations deploying military personnel as was the case for legitimizing military interventions in the Balkans during the 1990s and in Afghanistan and Iraq at the beginning of the 2000s. Across these at once different and similar contexts, we invite scholars to reflect on their ethnographic practices in order to better understand what the implications of specific cultural, institutional, and not least disciplinary circumstances are for conducting research on soldier and veteran sociality.

The workshop asks participants to address two main questions in their interrelation: one, what are the methodological and research ethical challenges of conducting research on soldier and veteran sociality seen from the specificities of the particular empirical field scholars conduct their research in, and two, what challenges to conducting research among soldiers, veterans, and their social networks arise due to the specific disciplinary and academic contexts that scholars are part of (e.g. applied and consultant research, intervention and action research, anthropology, sociology, feminism, critical theory, history)? Discussing these two questions across the different contributions, the workshop ultimately aims at providing insights into the contemporary dynamics of conducting ethnographic research on soldier and veteran sociality.

Scholars at all stages of their career (graduate students, PhD-students, postdoctoral and senior scholars) are invited to send an abstract of a maximum of 500 words and a short biographical note to: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> by no later than the 31st of October 2016. As the workshop's aim is to stimulate engaging discussions across the different contributions, the number of participants is limited to 14. Confirmed keynote speakers are Sabine Kienitz (Universität Hamburg), Birgitte Refslund Sørensen (University of Copenhagen), Kevin McSorley (University of Portsmouth), Kenneth MacLeish (Vanderbilt University), and Kristian Søby Kristensen (University of Copenhagen). The workshop will take place in Copenhagen at the Emdrup campus of the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University on December 8th and 9th 2016, and is convened by Sebastian Mohr, Asst. Prof. of Educational Sociology and Birgitte Refslund Sørensen, Assoc. Prof. of Anthropology. The workshop is organized by the research unit Qualitative Studies of Socialization at the Danish School of Education in collaboration with the Center for Military Studies, University of Copenhagen and the Danish Veteran Center.


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