INJURY: Mapping injury: the embodied, socio-cultural and material sites of political emergence

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The concept of injury has multiple iterations and manifestations. It can point to injured bodies as casualties of war. It can refer to injured pride or humiliation, as products of discriminatory practices and 'hate speech'. It can apply to the destruction of habitats and environments, human actions that produce immediate and long-term suffering. We often confine the concept to casualties of war, yet these other forms can be as devastating to human life and well-being, theirimpact manifest well beyond their moment of occurrence. If we define injury in embodied, socio-cultural, and sociomaterial terms, as this project intends, we can trace its impact politically; in terms of the emergence and expression of political agency and the form and directionality such agency takes, and in terms of how the discursive and institutional structures designed to variously mitigate, govern, and repair are navigated and mobilised. The project places the analytical and empirical lens on injury, with the aim of providing a new theorisation that, for the first time, uses a relational understanding that integrates the intersection of embodied experience, with socio-cultural and socio-materialdynamics. Using case studies based in the global south, and reflecting injuries to bodies, lived spaces, infrastructures, and habitats, the project's objectives seek to reveal: 1) the topographies of injury and the global entanglementsimplicated in their production; 2) the processes whereby injury enters political discourse and contestation; 3) the structures that govern the impact of injury normatively and politically; and 4) the ethical implications of the theorisation and empirical investigation proposed. The original contribution of the project derives from its theorisation, based as it is on a relational epistemology and ontology, and its empirical investigation, tracing the path between injury and the political, drawing on qualitative methods (based on textual, oral, and visual sources).