Understanding Afghanistan: Historical and Ethnographic Perspectives
Wed, Oct 13, 2021 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM Hawaii Standard Time (UTC-10)
Register here.
Join us for a conversation on Afghanistan.
About this event
Since the US and allied forces decided to leave Afghanistan, and especially the Taliban’s return to power, global conversations about these events have emphasized their geopolitical implications. To understand more about what the people of Afghanistan are currently facing, historical and ethnographic perspectives on life in the country are equally important. The speakers in this colloquium will examine the country’s complex past, in prior centuries and recent decades, toward providing a perspective of both greater depth and breadth than those found in contemporary media narratives.
The conversation in this colloquium is aimed especially at students and nonspecialists desiring a better understanding of Afghanistan. In the spirit of building closer working relationships among our South Asia affiliate faculty and community, we are very pleased to introduce our speakers, Abdul Karim Khan of Leeward Community College, Jimmy Weir, formerly of UH Mānoa, and Kim Gamel from Honolulu Civil Beat.
Dr. Abdul Karim Khan was born and educated in Peshawar, the Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan. After receiving Master’s degrees in British Literature and South Asian History from the University of Peshawar, and another Master’s degree in European Diplomatic History from Eastern Washington University, Washington, Mr. Khan had the honor of getting his PhD degree in Modern South Asian History under the late Professor Jagdish Sharma at the Department of History, University of Hawaii at Manoa. His doctoral dissertation chronicles the struggle of a Gandhi-inspired Pashtun nationalist movement of Abdul Ghaffar Khan in the North-West Frontier Province of British India, 1927-1947. Dr. Khan teaches courses in World History, Asian History, Islamic Civilization, and History of International Terrorism in the University of Hawaii’s Leeward Community College. He has been following the rise and fall, and now again the rise, of Taliban since 1996. Dr. Khan is currently making modifications in his doctoral manuscript for publication at the Oxford University Press. He is also preparing for publication another book length manuscript, “Understanding Afghanistan.” He hopes, rather prays hard, both of his books will be out in a year or two.
James (Jimmy) Weir has a PhD in cultural anthropology from the Graduate Center at City University of New York. His dissertation, “We Went to the Hills”: Four Afghan Life Stories, uses life narrative to examine the historical experiences and emotional legacies of the Afghan-Soviet war. His interest in this region began nearly twenty-five years ago when he was based as Peace Corps Volunteer teacher at a residential college in Balochistan province, Pakistan. After this, he worked for 2 years on a UN/IOM Afghan repatriation project. In 2004/05 he conducted cultural anthropology fieldwork based in Kabul. In July 2011 he returned to Honolulu from Kabul – after a year of research and report writing for an Afghan NGO – to direct the Muslim Societies in Asia and the Pacific program at the University of Hawai‘i. He has published on Afghan culture, security, and insurgency in Foreign Policy, The Diplomat, Christian Science Monitor and The Economics and Security Journal.
Kim Gamel is a deputy editor for Honolulu Civil Beat. Kim came to Hawaii after many years abroad, most recently in Seoul covering the Korean Peninsula for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. She previously was a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press, with assignments in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Egypt and elsewhere. A Russian major in college, she began her career as a reporter with an English-language newspaper in Moscow, the Moscow Tribune, as the Soviet Union was starting to disintegrate. She later went to work for The Associated Press in Iowa, North Carolina and New York before being posted as the Nordic/Baltic news editor in Sweden. A highlight of that period was going reindeer herding with indigenous Sami north of the Arctic Circle. A native of Idaho, Kim went to Bates College in Maine and has a master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism. She also was a 2015 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan.
