Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Gender as a Category of Knowledge

PhD Project:

Knowing Suicide Bombing: Epistemic Violence and Occidentalism in Terrorism Studies

Description of the project

This study uses perspectives from the sociology of science to introduce a feminist postcolonial view to a highly contested field of expertise – terrorism studies. It delineates an innovative methodological approach towards the »knowledge« of terrorism, which has become a privileged signifier in the occidentalist self-assertion of Western dominance. What we know about »(suicide) terrorism« and how we generate this knowledge, I argue, are embedded in practices of globally asymmetric power arrangements of which the new IR-subdiscipline of terrorism studies constitutes a vital part. By analyzing and interpreting a vast array of texts, graphs, models, and images taken from major publications about »suicide bombing« from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the book establishes a link between the various forms of political violence that are discussed in the material, on the one hand, and the implicit dimension of epistemic violence that is inherent in this field of knowledge production, on the other.

The dissertation thesis was successfully defended at Vienna University’s Department for Political Science in 2009. In 2011, it was awarded the Christiane Rajewsky Award for young scholars issued by the German Association for Peace and Conflict Studies.

Claudia Brunner has studied political science and gender studies at Vienna University and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She was member of the graduate program at Humboldt-University from 2005 to 2008 and worked at its Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies in 2009. Since 2010, she has been working as a PostDoc at the Centre for Peace Studies and Peace Education at Klagenfurt University (Assistant Professor 2015-2020, Associate Professor since 2020).

Brunner’s work was awarded with the Christiane Rajewsky Price in 2011 and the Caroline von Humboldt Price in 2012.

Her habilitation project »Theorizing Epistemic Violence« was funded in the Elise Richter programme of excellence issued by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) from 2015 to 2020 (project nr. V368-G15). For further information see www.epistemicviolence.info.

Selected Publications

For monographs and edited volumes see German version of this website.

Female Suicide Bombing, in: Jill Steans/Daniela Tepe-Belfrage (Ed.):Handbook on Gender in World Politics, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, 2016, 215-222.

Expanding the Combat Zone. Sex-Gender-Culture Talk and Cognitive Militarization Today, in: International Feminist Journal of Politics, online first, January 11^th 2016.

Knowing Suicide Terrorism? Tracing Epistemic Violence across Scholarly Expertise. In: Ethiopian Renaissance Journal of Social Sciences and the Humanities 2016, 3(1): 3-20.

Assassins, Virgins, Scholars. Epistemologies and Geopolitics in Scholarly Knowledge on Suicide Bombing. In: Ahäll, Linda/Shepherd, Laura (Ed.): Gender, Agency and Political Violence. Rethinking Political Violence. Houndmills 2012: 132-150.

FURTHER PUBLICATIONS

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