This cross-curricular event brings Dr. Yamuna Sangarasivam, a professor of anthropology, to share a reading and discuss how her new book intersects with poetic form in order to create what she calls "speculative ethnography: an experimental methodology that bends time and space in order to view a subject through many genres, discursive forms, human stories, and complex theories simultaneously."

Dr. Sangarasivam's new book, Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism: A Speculative Ethnography of War, is an innovative anthropology inquiry into the intersecting forces of nationalism, terrorism, and patriotism that normalize the global war on terror; it reveals how war becomes a choice for violence that is interdependent. Seamlessly weaving together her field work, interviews, poetry, documentary evidence, and oral histories, each chapter reveals seemingly disparate narratives from multiple experiences and sites of war: soldiers, insurgents, civilians, and leaders of nation-states become human beings whose stories are starkly juxtaposed with both the tactics of suicide bombings and the drones of asymmetric warfare. This book invites readers to witness our attachment to killing and being killed in service of patriotic pride and national belonging. It presents a radical way of thinking about what it means to be human in these precarious times when there is no singular narrative that will bring us all together. Sangarasivam's speculative ethnography is one more step towards bringing an anthropological consciousness into a divided world.

Dr. Yamuna Sangarasivam is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Women & Gender Studies Program at Nazareth College, Rochester, NY. Her areas of research and teaching include critical terrorism studies; critical security studies; nationalism, terrorism and resistance; intersectionalities of race, class, gendered identities, national/transnational identities, sexualities, and divergent abilities; anthropology of dance; critical diversity studies; and decolonizing pedagogies. Published in January 2022 by Palgrave Macmillan, Nationalism, Terrorism, Patriotism: A Speculative Ethnography of War, is her new book.