Edward Said Memorial Lecture: Liberation Medicine

The Department of English and Comparative Literature invites you to the Edward Said Memorial Lecture with Ghassan S. Abu-Sittah, professor of conflict medicine at the American University of Beirut and Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow.

Based on his forthcoming book of the same title, the lecture follows Abu-Sittah's clinical and intellectual journey from the 1982 siege of Beirut to the genocide in Gaza, through the wars of the Arab world, from Palestine to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Along the way, he looks for the theoretical lenses needed to read what violence leaves on bodies and lives.

He argues that the clinic is where oppression is embodied and resisted. He reads the war wound as a biological archive of the war that caused it, and looks at the mutilation at the heart of settler-colonial violence, from the Marches of Return to the Pager attack in Lebanon, and what Shalhoub-Kevorkian calls the "unchilding" of Palestinian children. He also looks at the destruction of Gaza's health system as 21st-century scorched earth, and at how capital uses injury to manage surplus populations from Glasgow to Rafah, and increasingly to make a profit from wounding.

The lecture ends by proposing Liberation Medicine: turning clinical knowledge into emancipatory praxis, as an alternative to both colonial humanitarianism and corporatized healthcare in the North.