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JOANNA BOURKE

Blogs
Here are my latest blogs! Enjoy.


Ishiuchi Miyako, Photography, & ‘Hiroshima’
Ishiuchi Miyako, ‘ ひろしま/hiroshima ’, #71, 2007. ‘The photograph gives off mixed signals. Stop this [the violence], it urges. But it...
Jun 126 min read


Wound Nationalism: ‘Culture Wars’ and the Politics of ‘The People’
(This is the spoken version of the Alan Graham Memorial Lecture, that I gave at the conference ‘We The People’, Irish Association for...
Apr 2624 min read


‘It Makes My Head Jump’: Shell-Shock, Psychology, and War 1914-1945
On the 7 July 1916, Arthur Hubbard painfully set pen to paper in an attempt to explain to his mother why he was no longer in France. He...
Feb 11, 202426 min read


The Killing Frenzy: Wartime Narratives of Enemy Action
William Manchester was a scared young American, flung down on the island of Okinawa during the Second World War and expected to act with...
Feb 11, 202419 min read


The Strange Case of George Dedlow: Mutilation, Military Surgery, and Weir Mitchell
On the 29 June 1864, a military surgeon in the 21st Kentucky Infantry wrote to his wife. ‘It has been almost one continued stream of...
Feb 11, 20247 min read


Rape (a very very short history)
We are never told her name. None of the soldiers encircling her would have been interested in such niceties. The only relevant...
Feb 6, 20244 min read


Human Rights: Are They Universal?
God, the source of natural law is dead: long live international law, with its hallowed spectre, human rights. State-sponsored terror,...
Feb 6, 202412 min read


World War One: The Home Front
Fear, grief, sorrow: these are the overriding emotions of war. For men, women, and children confined to the home front between 1914 and...
Feb 6, 20248 min read


Cruelty: Pain, War, Sexual Abuse
The three sites of cruelty I will explore are (firstly) hierarchies of sentience, (secondly) wartime wounding, and (thirdly) sexual...
Feb 6, 202421 min read


Training in Violence: Military Hazing
In 1975, Dennis Coates published a short book of poetry inspired by his time at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy. One poem –...
Feb 5, 202411 min read


State Torture
Just two months after the 9/11 attacks in New York City and Washington DC, Fox TV broadcast the first of their series ‘24’. The main...
Feb 5, 202429 min read


Sexual Assault in the Military
Sexual violence and abuse are ingrained into military cultures. Armed conflict not only radically lowers the threshold at which...
Feb 5, 20245 min read


Military '#MeToo'
In this blog, I reflect on the devastating conclusions of a report by the Defense Committee (25 July 2021) entitled ‘Protecting Those Who...
Feb 5, 20247 min read
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