Dr Samid Suliman1
1Griffith University, Australia
Biography:
Dr Samid Suliman is Senior Lecturer, Migration and Security, in the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Science at Griffith University. He is a member of the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, and a lead researcher with the Griffith University Climate Action Beacon and the Disrupting Violence Beacon. His expertise is in migration and mobility, globalisation and culture, political science and political theory, climate change and postcolonial studies. Among his recent publications is Performance, Resistance, and Refugees (co-edited with Suzanne Little and Caroline Wake, Routledge, 2023).
Abstract:
This paper outlines an emerging program of research that seeks to uncover the multiscalar political geographies of slow violence that are (re)produced within and beyond the Woomera Prohibited Area (WPA). This paper develops pursues two initial primary lines of inquiry. The first of these concerns the theorisation of slow violence in militarised landscapes, with particular attention to the ways that the distributed and diffuse nature of slow violence demands greater and renewed attention to the transversal spatialities and temporalities that complicate the accepted or assumed political geographies of ‘national’ security. The second, and related, line of inquiry concerns the methodological problem of visibilising, documenting and witnessing the effects of slow violence on militarised landscapes, where slow violence is both unseen (by escaping or evading the visualities upon which much geographical research depends) and unobservable (due to being shrouded in regimes of secrecy, or being occluded by the complex diachronicity of the militarised present). In response to these concerns, the paper concludes by outlining how the practice-based methods of sonic visualisation and synaesthetic image-making can allow us to visualise and visiblise the unseen and unobserved forms of slow violence that connect distant spaces and times transversally, on a global scale.