Architecture of In/Security – Sadia Shirazi

Fri, Feb 4, 2022 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5)

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Architecture of In/Security: Mapping Bombs, Bricks, and Militarization in Lahore

About this event

Sadia Shirazi – Asian American, Pacific Rim, and Transnational Asian Studies Postdoctoral Fellow, Departments of History and Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

This is a hybrid event, held in Mergenthaler 426 on Johns Hopkins’ campus and streamed over Zoom.

This talk traces the emergence of the militarization of the city of Lahore in response to a series of bomb blasts in the late 2000s, which corresponded with a U.S. troop surge in Afghanistan and coordinated military operations by Pakistan in its North-West Frontier Province. It examines the ways in which power inscribes itself in urban space through a theorization of an “architecture of in/security” that includes structural and conceptual approaches to space—walls, barriers, gates, and checkpoints and discourses of securitization that deploy tropes of the outsider. Radical cartography is used as an analytic and disruptive tool to interrogate the securitization of the city and render such architecture more transparent.