New special issue in Ethnos: The Ethnography of Things Military – Empathy and Critique in Military Anthropology'

Birgitte Refslund Sørensen and Matti Weisdorf recently contributed to a special issue in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology with the article 'Awkward Moments in the Anthropology of the Military and the (Im)possibility of Critique'

With a point of departure in the authors’ engagements with veterans, professionals, and fellow academics, the article explores co-existing political, professional, and scholarly framings of the figure of the war veteran. The article focuses on ‘awkward fieldwork moments’, when the authors felt caught between conflicting normative views of the veteran that each demanded different appropriate reactions and scrutinise the (im)possibilities of critique that these situations present.

Further. alongside Sebastian Mohr from Karlstad University, Birgitte Refslund Sørensen and Matti Weisdorf have co-written the introduction to the special issue and co-edited a roundtable featuring Eyal Ben-Ari, Sarah Hautzinger, Jean Scandlyn, Kevin McSorley, and Zoë Wool on the particular challenges facing social scientific research on ‘things military’.

Finally, the special issue offers original contributions by Kenneth MacLeish (Vanderbilt University), Eva van Roekel (Vrije University, Amsterdam) and former PhD fellow at the Department of Anthropology, Thomas Randrup (Royal Danish Defence College).

The contributions will only appear as a collection during spring 2020, but all of the contributions are available online as of now.

The article by Sørensen and Weisdorf can be found here 

See the special issue introduction and the roundtable.