Living war, writing war, teaching war

ABSTRACT

What does it mean to be an academic who is also a war veteran? This paper examines that question as I delve into my own identity and positionality as a war veteran and as an academic who critically examines war and militarism. It is broken up into three sections: living war, writing war, and teaching war. Living war refers to what it is like to be a war veteran in academic spaces, from a student perspective to a teaching perspective. Writing war examines some of the ways in which war experiences can be utilized in academic writing, as it examines a few useful methodologies that were helpful and healing in my experience. Finally, teaching war reiterates the importance to centre war in the classroom and provides an example that I often use in the classroom. The primary aim of this paper is to discuss the reciprocal aspects of the interactions between my embodied war experience and higher education institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• War
• embodiment
• veterans
• pedagogy
• academia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See also: Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in Military Studies, eds. Joseph Soerers, Patricia Shields, Sebastiaan Rietjens. London: Routledge (2014). As well as the ‘Critical’ field journals, including this one, Critical Military Studies, Critical Security Studies, etc.

2. For other conversations on veterans turning to drugs and alcohol see: Finley, Erin. Fields of Combat: Understanding PTSD among Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, New York: Cornell Press (2012); Wool, Zoe, After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed, Durham: Duke University Press (2015).

3. This has also been observed by others as well, such as the cited Mark Bauman (2009) article.

4. To be an officer in the US military you either need to attend one of the service academies or you need to go through ROTC programs that are at most US universities.

5. Much thanks to Elizabeth Dauphinee who was the reviewer for the article, for helping come up with the term, and Jenny Edkins for her comments at the conference that helped me to better conceptualize it.

6. See the Journal of Narrative Studies for a number of amazing narrative accounts that connect to International Relations. https://jnp.journals.yorku.ca/; I would also like to recognize some other great academics and their amazing innovative research and interesting methods around militarism, including but not limited to Rachel Woodward’s (2004) book ‘Military Geographies,’ Woodward and Neil Jenkings’ (2018) reflections on his service as well as memoirs in ‘Bringing War to Book: Writing and Producing the Military Memoir,’ Alice Cree’s (2019) article ‘Encountering the’lively’ in military theatre,’ Sarah Bulmer and Victoria Basham’s (2017) ‘Critical Military Studies as Method: an Approach to Studying Gender and the Military,’ as well as all of Sarah Bulmer and Maya Eichler’s (2017) amazing work on gender and masculinity, such as ‘Unmaking militarized masculinity: veterans and the project of military-to-civilian transition,’ and Bulmer & Jackson’s (2015) ‘You do not live in my skin’: embodiment, voice, and the veteran,“ Kevin McSorely’s (2014) work on the body and senses, such as ‘Towards an Embodied Sociology of War,’ and his edited book (2015) ‘War and the Body: Militarisation, Practice and Experience,’ Synne Dyvik (2017) who not only was a reviewer for my book but also has amazing work around masculinity and embodiment such as ‘War Ink: Sense-making and curating war through military tattoos,’ (2018) and ‘Embodying militarism: exploring the spaces and bodies in between,’ I would be remiss to not mention Victoria Basham’s (2013) amazing book ‘War, identity and the liberal state: everyday experiences of the geopolitical in the Armed Forces’ that heavily influenced my own research, Paul Higate’s (2017) reflections on his service and articles like ‘Co-Constituting Bodyguarding Practice through Embodied Reflexivity: Methodological Reflections from the Field,’ Joanna Tidy’s (2016, 2017) work that I use in many of my classes like ‘Visual Regimes and the Politics of War Experience: Rewriting war “from above” in WikiLeaks’ Collateral Murder,’ and ‘The Gender Politics of “Ground Truth” in the Military Dissent Movement: The Power and Limits of Authenticity Claims Regarding War,’ Jesse Paul Crane-Seeber’s (2016) ‘Sexy warriors: The politics and pleasures of submission to the state,’ Chris Rossdale’s ‘Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion,’ Susana Hast’s amazing conference presentations and project ‘Bodies in War, Bodies in Dance’, Annick Wibben’s ‘Feminist security studies: A narrative approach’ and (2016) ‘Researching war: Feminist methods, ethics and politics,’ Hannah West and Sophy Antrobus’ ‘“Deeply odd”: women veterans as critical feminist scholars,’ and many more.

7. This was brought up on the EISA Veterans in IR panel in Barcelona.

8. There are many examples of this throughout my work, most specifically it is seen very clearly in my book Fight to Live, Live to Fight: Veteran Activism after War, as the relationships that are formed with my participants are great examples of ‘hanging out’ methodology.

9. These paintings are hard to find now, and many of the pictures I downloaded years ago. You can see some of them here: https://www.thecommononline.org/the-art-of-grief-windows-and-mirrors/

10. Some veteran artists push back against the ‘art therapy’ label as they want their art appreciated because it is great art and that they want to be considered artist first and foremost, versus veterans who are doing art to heal. However, it has always been my contention that it can do both, where it is both healing and they are artists.