Revealed in the Wound: Iraqibacter and the Biology of History

Omar Dewachi

Revealed in the Wound: Iraqibacter and the Biology of History

Omar Dewachi

 Bodies, Art, and Protection: Wounds

Building on ethnographic research on war wounds across the Middle East, this talk explores the rise of Iraqibacter, a “superbug” associated with the US occupation of Iraq in 2003. Tracing the histories and geographies of this superbug across the landscapes of war injury, he shows how unravelling ethnographic knowledge about antimicrobial resistance reveals deeper entanglements of this killer superbug in the political, biosocial, and environmental manifestations of long-term Western interventions and present-day conflict fallout across the region. Building on the notion of biology of history, the registration of human activity in bacterial life, Dewachi suggests that Iraqibacter could be understood as an archive of the changing ecologies and toxicities of war in Iraq and beyond.

Lecture, followed by a conversation with Hakan Topal.

Language: English

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Sponsors and Supporters

Curation: Sandra Noeth

A programme by Künstlerhaus Mousonturm Frankfurt am Main. Funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, Goethe-Institut, Freunde & Förderer des Mousonturms e.V. and Rudolf Augstein Foundation. Supported by Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin (HZT). In cooperation with the HTA Lecture Series “(Un)settled. Performance, Protection, and Politics of Insecurity” an event of the Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft of Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen in cooperation with the Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin (HZT) and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, fundeded by the Hessische Theaterakademie.