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data-type="Content"></ul> </div> </div> </div> </div> </header> <div id="content" class="site-content"> <div id="primary" class="content-area"> <main id="main" class="site-main site-container site-blog-singular"> <div class="site-blog-singular__left"> <article id="post-5184" class="post-5184 post type-post status-publish format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-academic-life category-anthropology category-asian-studies category-current-affairs category-education category-human-rights-law category-penn-press-news category-publishing"> <div class="post-thumbnail"> <img width="1500" height="500" src="https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/08150053/banner_Twitter_UPWeek-2024.jpg" class="attachment- size- wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/08150053/banner_Twitter_UPWeek-2024.jpg 1500w, https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/08150053/banner_Twitter_UPWeek-2024-300x100.jpg 300w, https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/08150053/banner_Twitter_UPWeek-2024-1024x341.jpg 1024w, https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/08150053/banner_Twitter_UPWeek-2024-768x256.jpg 768w, https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/08150053/banner_Twitter_UPWeek-2024-350x117.jpg 350w, https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/08150053/banner_Twitter_UPWeek-2024-150x50.jpg 150w" sizes="(max-width: 1500px) 100vw, 1500px" /> </div> <header class="entry-header"> <h1 class="entry-title">University Press Week: How does your press StepUP?</h1> <p class="entry-post-tags"> 11/15/2024<span class="byline"> | <span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="https://www.pennpress.org/blog/author/pvalelly/">pvalelly</a></span> </span><span class="cat-links">| <a href="https://www.pennpress.org/blog/category/academic-life/" rel="category tag">Academic Life</a>, <a href="https://www.pennpress.org/blog/category/anthropology/" rel="category tag">Anthropology</a>, <a href="https://www.pennpress.org/blog/category/asian-studies/" rel="category tag">Asian Studies</a>, <a href="https://www.pennpress.org/blog/category/current-affairs/" rel="category tag">Current Affairs</a>, <a href="https://www.pennpress.org/blog/category/education/" rel="category tag">Education</a>, <a href="https://www.pennpress.org/blog/category/human-rights-law/" rel="category tag">Human Rights & Law</a>, <a href="https://www.pennpress.org/blog/category/penn-press-news/" rel="category tag">Penn Press News</a>, <a href="https://www.pennpress.org/blog/category/publishing/" rel="category tag">Publishing</a> </span> </p> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="alignright size-full is-resized"><img decoding="async" width="700" height="399" src="https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/08154518/upw-logo-2024-red-4.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-5207" style="width:256px" srcset="https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/08154518/upw-logo-2024-red-4.jpg 700w, https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/08154518/upw-logo-2024-red-4-300x171.jpg 300w, https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/08154518/upw-logo-2024-red-4-350x200.jpg 350w, https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/08154518/upw-logo-2024-red-4-150x86.jpg 150w" sizes="(max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" /></figure></div> <p><em>Today’s post is a part of University Press Week 2024’s blog tour. This year, the members of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses)—an organization of 160 mission-driven publishers in the United States, Canada, and around the world—have chosen #StepUP as the theme for University Press Week. Every day, university presses worldwide step up to educate and enlighten, motivate and inspire, support and act.</em></p> <p><em>Today’s post reflects how Penn Press’s authors step up within their own disciplines, questioning and redefining underlying scholarly assumptions and exploring new approaches to core practices. Reposted from an earlier Penn Press blog post, this post comes from Omer Aijazi, who is a Lecturer in Disasters and Climate Crisis at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester and author of </em><a href="https://www.pennpress.org/9781512823608/atmospheric-violence/">Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir</a><em>. Here, he rethinks fieldnotes as “feeling notes” and considers the possibilities that this shift in thinking might create in writing ethnographically, drawing upon his experience researching Atmospheric Violence to demonstrate these ideas.</em></p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"> <p><em>People here make me laugh or want to cry. They depress me; they confuse me; they infuriate me. I can’t figure them out; I am left perplexed. How is it possible that they have such power over me? </em></p> <p class="has-text-align-right"><em>—A note from my journal</em></p> </blockquote> <div class="wp-block-image"> <figure class="alignleft size-large is-resized"><a href="https://www.pennpress.org/9781512823608/atmospheric-violence/"><img decoding="async" width="683" height="1024" src="https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/22115100/Aijazi-683x1024.jpeg" alt="Atmospheric Violence by Omer Aijazi" class="wp-image-4967" style="width:201px" srcset="https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/22115100/Aijazi-683x1024.jpeg 683w, https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/22115100/Aijazi-200x300.jpeg 200w, https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/22115100/Aijazi-768x1152.jpeg 768w, https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/22115100/Aijazi-1024x1536.jpeg 1024w, https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/22115100/Aijazi-1365x2048.jpeg 1365w, https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/22115100/Aijazi-325x488.jpeg 325w, https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/22115100/Aijazi-133x200.jpeg 133w, https://dhjhkxawhe8q4.cloudfront.net/penn-university-press/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/22115100/Aijazi-scaled.jpeg 1707w" sizes="(max-width: 683px) 100vw, 683px" /></a></figure></div> <p><em>Atmospheric Violence </em>is a mediation on life in the mountainscapes crisscrossing Kashmir and Northern Pakistan, near the contested India/Pakistan border. The book is organized as a series of interconnected <em>scenes</em>. Each <em>scene </em>acts as a framing device through which the feeling world is rendered palpable, encouraging us to hold extraordinary violence and ordinary concerns in the same breath. The first <em>scene</em> is dedicated to Niaz.</p> <p>I am currently in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital city. It is monsoon season. The weather is hot and unbearably humid. Everything is damp, sweaty, sticky. This time of the year, non-essential surgeries are postponed in hospitals. The murky weather slows down the healing of open wounds. As promised to him, I want to send Niaz a copy of my book, but I don’t have a postal address. Niaz cannot read English, but he still wants the book. After a few attempts, I managed to reach him on the phone. While he began with the customary “<em>Allah ka shukr hai</em>” (All is well, thanks to Allah), his voice is somber, his words measured. His breathing is heavy, labored, erratic.</p> <p>Niaz is paraplegic and requires round-the-clock care, a duty entrusted to his brother. According to some, his brother is possessed by a jinn giving him enormous capacity to be a dedicated caregiver. Due to the remote location of his village, Niaz rarely has access to a doctor. A nurse visits him when needed, to inspect any wounds and change his dressing. Open sores from prolonged stay on the charpoy are at a constant risk of life-threatening infection.</p> <p>Niaz is engaged in a most beautiful wait for his body to recover, pending divine authorization. On a prior occasion, he described how his cuts, bruises, and wounds have a life of their own. They can grow tender, swell, become inflamed. When this happens, the pain is intense akin to shards of glass cutting into one’s skin. There is unbearable burning. And bleeding. And itching. Niaz abruptly ended the phone call: “Omer <em>bhai</em> (brother), I am not doing so well. I feel very poorly. I am in pain.”</p> <p> It has not been possible to get a hold of Niaz since. I will try again in a few days. The internet and phone lines are a mess in Pakistan these days. The government has embarked on a massive surveillance campaign to catch political dissidents, intentionally disrupting communication, making it even harder to link with those in the country’s border zones.</p> <p>I feel a sense of urgency to see Niaz. I will travel to the mountains if I can’t reach him in the next few days. A colleague cautioned that I do not and should not have unfettered access to Niaz. Visiting him unannounced while he is not at his best will be a trespass.</p> <p><em>What does it mean to attend to the intensity of others?</em> For me, it means posing obstacles to the violent yet normalized expectation of consuming people’s lives without any ethical wounding or disorientation. And to imagine a more immediate, compelling, even tense relationship with our interlocutors that is not contingent on extraction but grounded in an attachment of deeply felt care. What if we imagine ethnography as a mode of receiving deeply? “Living each other’s lives and dying each other’s deaths” as Marshall Sahlins writes.<a href="#_edn1" id="_ednref1">[i]</a></p> <p><strong>Our Hearts Are Doomed to Fail</strong></p> <p>Knowledge, much like relationality, cannot be worked out in advance. But control theorists will disagree. In grad school, we are trained to “map the literature,” “find gaps in the literature”, and then “fill in” those exact gaps that we “discovered” earlier. But what about more spirited wayfinding that relies on gut, intuition, heart?</p> <p>In <em>Atmospheric Violence</em>, I make a case for thinking from the heart. Instead of field notes, I opted for feeling notes. Feminist STS scholar Anne Pollock contends that the heart is an object doomed to fail.<a href="#_edn2" id="_ednref2">[ii]</a> Heart failure, she explains, is not a result of any intrinsic injury but a result of the extra burdens placed on it by the body. Pollock asks: “What if the heart and its failure can become ways of thinking about objects in the world? What does a model of an object that is <em>intrinsically burdened </em>and <em>thus doomed </em>do . . . [for ethnography]?”<a href="#_edn3" id="_ednref3">[iii]</a></p> <p><strong>The Heart Has a Mind of Its Own</strong></p> <p><em>Atmospheric Violence</em> is an exercise in being attentive to heartbeats, that is, opening oneself to others despite the risk of wounding. Attention to heartbeats is exhausting. It requires an unlikely relation to knowledge marked by steady percolation— a slow ontology of being differently productive as we wait for knowledge to mark us. So that the future is not foreclosed even before it is forthcoming.</p> <p>Heartwork demands being content with uncertainty. In her work on abolition futures, Liat Ben-Moshe encourages us to let go of our “attachment to certain ways of knowing” that rely on certainty, expertise, and demands for clear alternatives.<a href="#_edn4" id="_ednref4">[iv]</a> She advocates for a stance of not-knowing or dis-epistemology. This may be contrary to how we are trained to think: diagnostically, laser-focused on end goals, intent on finding, grasping, having.</p> <p><strong>But Where Should the Disobedient Go?</strong></p> <p>I wrote <em>Atmospheric Violence</em> for the spirited and enthralled. Control theorists are not my kin. The awry, the astray, the transgressive are invited. 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