​Feeling Contemporary War:
How Global Regimes of Sensing and Emotion Facilitate and Resist Military Power
Editors: Drs. Alex Adams & Amy Gaeta
In some ways, war does not change. In others, it is constantly in flux. Contemporary warfare is aided, disrupted, and mediated by ever-developing digital technologies, semi-autonomous and autonomous weapons and equipment, deepfake AI propaganda, mediation through social media, and much more. These shifts suggest that contemporary warfare is in some sense a ‘new’ modality of conflict, or at least that it has new and distinctive characteristics that are in urgent need of analysis and critique. What is clear is that we must scrutinize the utility of the central binaries that structure our knowledge of war—wartime and peacetime, battlefield and safe zone, innocence and complicity—in order to understand the state of contemporary armed conflict. Before we can understand contemporary war, we contend, two interpretive gestures are necessary: firstly, to more fully sense war and apprehend the multiple ways that war becomes embodied; secondly, we must account for war’s multivocality and expand the ‘we’ of who gets to speak about their embodied experience of war.
This book investigates the multiform ways in which war is sensed and felt by underrepresented perspectives that diverge from the hegemonic norm, and by doing so, strives to arrive at an expanded vision of the sensorial complexity of contemporary armed conflict. Looking beyond both established ways of comprehending war and formally declared wars, the edited volume aims to examine an expansive range of exercises in military power: settler colonial violence, state-sanctioned genocide, enslavement, militarized policing, and wars against non-human entities such as drugs or COVID-19. All of those involve state force in ways that echo or replicate the forms of violence that are commonly referred to under the rubrics of war. If we are willing to critically reflect on the regimes of sensing and emotions we each differently inhabit, we contend, these insights can enrich and deepen our understandings of war, state power, and—crucially—the ways that they may be resisted. In particular, we ask:
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How do the current apparatuses of warfare and state power function to produce, transmit, and circulate affects within and across frontlines?
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Through what factors and within which limits do feelings become ‘legitimate’ political information recognized by the state or other entities (e.g., activists, anti-state actors, publics) engaged in discourse around martial power?
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How are sensorial apprehensions of warfare connected to actions and materialities, such as solidarity, boycotts, or violence (whether active participation or indirect/figurative investments)?
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We seek to highlight the intimate ways that bodies and war interact, refract from one another, across time and space, and affirm that the body is a valuable site of knowledge. In particular, we aim to provide an alternative to what Eve Tuck (2009) calls a “damaged-centered framing” of warfare which entrenches a certain set of political and representational conventions around war—suffering, violence, death, bitterness, revenge, defeat—which, though doubtlessly important, can overdetermine and reify the ways war is known. By focusing on the sensory texture of ordinary life under conditions of war, including the transgenerational reverberations of past wars, this volume aims to undercut such totalizing narratives or conceptualizations about the experience of state force, which, after all, is so multiform and complex that generalizations about it are often doomed to fail. Further, the discourse surrounding the ambiguous concept of the ‘civilian experience of war’ is often built upon attitudes towards the impacted civilians and the nature of the war itself that are themselves clearly open to critique and readjustment.
This edited collection builds on our special issue Militarisation and Pleasure, in which the editors elaborated on the feminist insight that the ‘civilian’ and the ‘military’, so often considered discrete and separate, are often foundationally interconnected in a complex range of granular and capillary ways (Howell 2018). This volume is a sort of sequel as it will examine the ways in which matters of military force are differently sensed. We are interested in different types of qualitative methods from a range of humanities and social science disciplines. In particular, we think the following fields and theoretical dispositions will best fit our vision for the edited collection: Critical and Feminist IR, Critical Surveillance and Security Studies, Political Geography, Gender and Sexuality Studies, STS, Visual Cultures, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, Critical Race Studies, AI Ethics, Cultural and Literary Studies, and Decolonial and Postcolonial Studies. We are especially keen to hear from scholars from the Global South, including diasporic voices.
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The editors invite scholars of all disciplinary and professional backgrounds to submit a 350-500 word abstract for consideration. Final papers will be expected to fall within the range of 6000-8000 words. We welcome papers that explore any aspect of the topic, but are especially interested in the following:
Infrastructures, Contexts, and Mobilizations
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Incarceration, policing, borders, psychiatric institutions, detention
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Protests, movements, resistance, riots, and activism
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Supply chains, capital flows, trade infrastructure, war economies
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Transnational solidarities, coalitional labour, mutual aid
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Digital infrastructure, algorithms, platform moderation, online censorship
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Surveillance, snitching, community watch
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Architecture, real estate, city planning (especially in the context of settlement)
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Climate disaster, extraction, weaponization of natural resources
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Structures of desire, sexual norms and ‘deviances,’ and sexual communities
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Materialities, Texts, and Images
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Video games, films, literary texts, music
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Pornographic and violent content; recordings of unsimulated sex & violence
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Social media, apps, podcasts, memes, generative AI content
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Witness accounts (memoir, testimony, documentation)
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Material culture (fashion, toys, collecting)
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Content regarding food, leisure, lifestyle, exercise
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Domesticated military technologies (e.g., GPS, drones, consumer robotics)
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Feelings, Emotions, and Embodiments
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Ennui, boredom, numbness, saturation
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Avoidance, distance, trying not to feel war
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Doom, fatalism, hopelessness, dread
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Pleasure, comfort, excitement
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Humour, laughter
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Empowerment, hope
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Anxiety, paranoia
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Confusion, overwhelm
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Each proposal must:
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Be between 350-500 words.
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State clearly how it directly addresses the central themes of the edited collection. Proposals that do not demonstrate a clear link to the topic are much more likely to be rejected (even if we otherwise like them).
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Include a 150-200 word author bio.
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Include a brief sample bibliography, which should aim to give the editors a clear sense of the author’s citational practice, materials, and intellectual context (not included in word count).
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Indicate whether visual materials will be included, and if so how many. Please note that authors are responsible for ensuring that they have the right to reproduce any visual materials that they plan to include.
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Be sent to sensingwareditedcollection@gmail.com by July 19th, 2025.
Schedule
Please submit all proposals no later than July 19th, 2025. Authors can expect a response no later than September 1st, 2025. The subsequent schedule is to be determined with the publisher, although we anticipate that full-length submissions will be due Spring 2026 with peer review and appropriate revisions to follow; final publication is anticipated in early 2027. We are willing to accommodate extensions where necessary, but inclusion in the final manuscript requires a commitment to meeting this schedule.
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We are currently in discussions regarding a number of potential publication avenues, but please be aware that the volume does not currently have a finalized home. The final publication venue will be a reputable peer-reviewed academic press with global distribution.
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About the Editors
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Alex Adams is an independent scholar and musician. They have published four monographs on the representation of contemporary political violence, most recently Kill Box: Military Drone Systems and Cultural Production (2024, Rowman & Littlefield). They are writing Godzilla: A Critical Demonology, which will be a full critical account of every Godzilla movie.
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Amy Gaeta is an academic, teacher, poet, and disability justice advocate. Currently, they are a Research Associate at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence and the Center for Drones and Culture at the University of Cambridge. They hold a Ph.D. in English and Visual Cultures from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and have strong research interests in: Drone Studies, Critical Disability Studies, Feminist STS, Visual Cultures Theory, and 21st American Transnational Literatures and Cultures. Learn more at amygaeta.com.
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