BORDERLINES ANNOUNCES THE LAUNCH OF A NEW COLLABORATIVE PROJECT WITH THE TECHNOLOGIES OF POWER PROJECT AND THE JOINT PUBLICATION OF A NUMBER OF SHORT VIDEO LECTURES FROM THE VIRTUAL CONFERENCE. THE THIRD LECTURE SERIES TITLED ‘‘AFGHANISTAN: IS THE WAR OVER?’ FEATURES THREE TALKS BY SANAA ALIMIA, MARYA HANNUN, ALI OLOMI, & BILAL SARWARY.

This week’s Technologies of Power: Tracing Empire at Home and Abroad lecture series features a discussion around the recent events of Afghanistan.

From imperial projects that devastated entire regions in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa to the domestic expansion of explicit white supremacy, surveillance, and policing, US technologies of power have generated a multidirectional and dialectical relationship between foreign wars and domestic issues.

Funded by the Humanities War & Peace Initiative Grant at Columbia University, Technologies of Power will encourage intersectional conversations on race, empire, technologies, and policing that break the boundaries between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic,’ ‘abroad’ and ‘home,’ ‘technology’ and ‘power.’ 

7 conversations. 21 scholars, writers, and activists. 

Sanaa Alimia is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations. She is a 2021/2022 recipient of the British Academy/ Leverhulme Small Grants Award for her research project, ‘Digital Borders, Bodies, and Mobility in South Asia’. Her manuscript, ‘Refugee Cities: How Afghans Transformed Pakistan’ is out in 2022 (University of Pennsylvania Press). Her work on the surveillance and deportation of nationals from Afghanistan in Pakistan and Europe has been published and shared in academic journals, print and online media, policy networks, and migrant rights groups. Alimia was a research fellow at the Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin (2014-2019) and a Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Peshawar (2013-2017). 

Marya Hannun is a historian of Afghanistan in/and the Middle East. She received her PhD from Georgetown University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Her work focuses on Afghan women’s movements in the early years of independence and transregional intellectual history. Her publications include, “From Afghan Pan-Islamism to Turkish Feminism: Examining Transnational Solidarities in the Early Twentieth Century” for the Journal of Mid East Women’s Studies.

Ali Olomi is historian of the Middle East and Islam researching, writing, and publishing on medieval and modern Muslim thought. He studies how Muslims imagined the “Islamic world” at the intersection of religion, science, and empire and how Muslims in the premodern and modern world deployed the concept of homeland to etch the borders of empire, construct collective identity, and imagine the other. His research examines the Muslim imagination of the monstrous through the djinn, the early history of astronomy and its role in empire-building, and Islamic apocalypticism and cosmology. Olomi also holds an interest in the deep roots of nationalism, the histories of science and rationality, Islamism, gender and sexuality, and the tension between global religious community and local identity.

Bilal Sarwary is an Afghan journalist who has worked extensively with western media including being a BBC reporter covering Afghanistan since 2001 beginning with the  US-led invasion that toppled the Taliban. Sarwary is also an independent scholar majoring in the central linkages between warfare, drugs, terrorism, and the  the FARC-ification of the Taliban. He graduated from Middlebury College in 2010.

Follow the @techofpower project on twitter and stay tuned for the next talk.