Shadows of militarism: an ethnography of trauma and resistance among soldiers and veterans in post-9/11 USA.

This thesis critically examines the military disciplining of trauma through a detailed ethnographic study of post-9/11 lower-enlisted soldiers and veterans in the U.S. who have links to a national movement of resistance to, and healing from, militarism. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork at two G.I. coffeehouses and with the post-9/11 veteran anti-militarism movement in U.S., it analyses the journey of joining the military, becoming a soldier, leaving the military and veteran identities. It explores militarism and military power as a cultural process which reproduces and conceals itself within normative conceptions of the everyday, and military trauma as a site of contested power and resistance. In doing so, this research addresses an urgent need to critically engage with military trauma as a means to challenge normalised discourses of militarism. This research reveals a disjuncture between the imagined and lived reality of military identities in the post-9/11 era. It explores the politics of recognition of veterans’ public and private lives, their contested identities, and their constrained relationship to the state. It argues that veterans are silenced and their identities reduced to symbolic tools in a public military imaginary which constructs military trauma into politically manageable categories, while disciplining and silencing the nation from critically examining war and militarism. In this way, this thesis argues that veterans serve a vital function in U.S. society by absorbing and containing the violence of the state, which then becomes unspeakable, unhearable, and inescapable. This thesis shows how a small number of soldiers and veterans are pushing back against this narrative. In sum, this thesis seeks to challenge the disciplinary effects of militarism upon trauma and support veteran voices to speak their own truths.

Towards a Bourdieusian analysis of the disabled body and practice: embodying negative symbolic capitals and the uneasy experience of hysteresis

Within the last few years, disabled people have become the target of government austerity measures through drastic cuts to welfare justified through the portrayal of benefit claimants as inactive, problem citizens who are wilfully unemployed. For all that is wrong with these cuts, they are one of many aspects of exclusion that disabled people face. Attitudes towards disability are deteriorating (Scope, 2011) and disabled people are devalued and negatively positioned in a myriad of ways, meaning that an understanding of the perceptions and positioning of disability and the power of disabling practices is critical. This thesis will examine how Bourdieu’s theoretical repertoire may be applied to the area of Disability Studies in order to discern how society produces oppressive and exclusionary systems of classification which structures the social position and perceptions of disability. The composite nature of disability and multiple forms of exclusion and inequality associated with it benefits from a multipronged approach which acknowledges personal, embodied and psychological aspects of disability alongside socio-political and cultural conceptualisations. Bourdieu’s approach is one in which the micro and macro aspects of social life are brought together through their meso interplay and provides a thorough analysis of the many aspects of disability.