CMES Colloquium: Ronak Kapadia, University of Illinois Chicago

Video: 

Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War 
March 4, 2021 

Ronak K. Kapadia is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. An interdisciplinary cultural theorist of race, security, sensation, and empire in the late 20th and early 21st century United States, Kapadia is author of Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press 2019), which theorizes the queer world-making potential of contemporary art and aesthetics in the ongoing context of US war and empire in the Greater Middle East. His broader research and teaching fields include critical ethnic studies; race radical and transnational feminisms; queer of color critique; Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporas; national security and surveillance; critical carceral and military studies; and visual and performance studies. His research has been supported by the Mellon/ACLS Fellowship, the Consortium for Faculty Diversity in the Liberal Arts Colleges, the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, and numerous institutional fellowships and grants. Kapadia’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Journal of Popular Music Studies, Feminist Formations, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Asian American Literary Review, Post45 Contemporaries, ASAP/J, and edited volumes including Shifting Borders: America and the Middle East/North Africa (AUB Press 2014), Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke UP 2016), and With Stones in Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism, and US Empire (U Minnesota Press 2018). With Simone Browne and Katherine McKittrick, Kapadia co-edited the 2017 special issue of Surveillance and Society on race and surveillance. His new book project, “Breathing in the Brown Queer Commons,” examines race-radical queer and trans migrant futurisms to develop a critical theory of healing justice and pleasure across transnational sites of security, terror, and war in the wilds of ecological chaos and US imperial decline.