Neel Ahuja
Biographic Data
| ID | 766783 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Neel Ahuja |
| GIVEN NAMES | Neel |
| FAMILY NAME | Ahuja |
| SIGNATURE | AHUJA N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Feminist Studies Department & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies University of California Santa Cruz CA USA |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 65 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Response to Focus Section
If Cold War competition between the US and the Soviet Union, decolonization of African range states, new international conservation treaties, and changing Indian policies around primate exports determined much of the twentieth-century history of the colonial biomedical primate trade, in the twenty-first century the importance of China as a supplier of the cynomolgus macaque and the rise of Chinese research influence in the life sciences – includi…
Attacks on Ethnic Studies
Herd Racialization and the Inequalities of Immunity
Herd Racialization and the Inequalities of Immunity Neel Ahuja (bio) The COVID-19 pandemic has been the context for public health institutions, epidemiologists, and a range of social scientists to make a public case for an idea concisely stated by the American Medical Association in November 2020: "Racism is a threat to public health."1 While activists and medical historians have long noted inequalities of access and outcomes for patients as well…
On Phooka: Beef, Milk, and the Framing of Animal Cruelty in Late Colonial Bengal
Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century
Neel Ahuja tracks the figure of the climate refugee in public media and policy over the past decade, arguing that journalists, security experts, politicians, and nongovernmental organizations have often oversimplified climate change and obfuscated the processes that drive mass migration. To understand the systemic reasons for displacement, Ahuja argues, it is necessary to reframe climate disaster as interlinked with the history of capitalism and …
More‐Than‐Human and Deeply Human Perspectives on Covid‐19
This multi‐authored contribution explores what the COVID‐19 pandemic demands of critical inquiry with a focus on the more‐than‐human. We show how COVID‐19 is a complex series of multispecies encounters shaped by humans, non‐human animals, and of course viruses. Central to these encounters is a politics of difference in which certain human lives are protected and helped to flourish while others, both human and animal, are forgotten if not sacrific…
Weather as War: Race, Disability, and Environmental Determinism in the Syrian Climate War Thesis
Reversible Human
This article explores the history and practice of rectal feeding, an anachronistic obstetric practice used recently as a form of medical rape in US Central Intelligence Agency prisons. The article outlines how racialized themes of counterterrorist interrogation intersect with behavioralist logics of torture in CIA uses of rectal feeding on Muslim prisoners captured in Pakistan and Afghanistan, linking these prisoners to US security state fears of…
Beyond Trigger Warnings
This roundtable asks what queer studies might offer to an analysis of debates on campus safety. New approaches in queer studies take as their object of study not only sex and gender but also the cultural politics of liberalism; in turn, scholarship on the geopolitics of injury demonstrates the situatedness of both identity and economic forms. Brought together, these scholarly approaches provide an important lens on many of the contradictions of c…
Animal Death as National Debility: Climate, Agriculture, and Syrian War Narrative
Reporting on the Syrian civil war and on Syrian migration to Europe since 2015 often suggests that a drought from 2006–2009 caused an agricultural collapse, spurring rural-to-urban migration and social conflict underpinning the uprisings of 2011. Such narratives regularly focus on the mass death of sheep, goats, and other “livestock” as indexes of the environmental violence underpinning war and migration. Climate security narratives tend to confi…
Race, Human Security, and the Climate Refugee
Research Article| September 01 2016 Race, Human Security, and the Climate Refugee Neel Ahuja Neel Ahuja University of California, Santa Cruz [email protected] Neel Ahuja is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz, where he is a core faculty member in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program. He is the author of Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government Of Species. His recent writ…
Intimate Atmospheres
This essay explores representations of parasitism and crisis in queer theory and public climate discourse in order to situate queer critiques of reproduction in the context of neoliberalism's ongoing carbon-driven extinctions. Focusing on racialized climate research that predicts the spread of mosquito-borne diseases from South to North in a warming world, the essay argues for the significance of ambient forms of reproduction that move across bot…
Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World
Histories of race and empire have shaped the field imaginary of species studies from its inception. Politically, the field's animal-activist heritage models its critique on movements for racial justice. Historically, this move links to Enlightenment conceptions of animals that relied on the same objectifying methods used to represent slaves and the poor: sentimentality, representations of cruelty, humane manifestos. Epistemologically, the taxonom…
Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect by Mel Y. Chen (review)
Reviewed by: Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect by Mel Y. Chen Neel Ahuja Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, by Mel Y. Chen. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012. Xi + 297 pp. $23.95 paper. ISBN: 978-0-8223-5272-3. To read Mel Chen’s book Animacies is both a challenge and a pleasure, as Chen’s playful text invites readers into a surprising range of themes, methods, and ethical commitments. Thi…
Notes on Medicine, Culture, and the History of Imported Monkeys in Puerto Rico
Chimpanzee Sanctuary: "Surplus" Life and the Politics of Transspecies Care
At the outset of the twenty-first century, chimpanzees have become the first nonhuman great ape species to achieve substantial protections in the form of state-recognized legal rights and care programs. In the United States, this development has been institutionalized by the 2000 Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance, and Protection Act, which established the first federally funded system of animal asylum in order to provide humane care for …
Unmodeling Minorities: The Sikh Temple Massacre and the Question of Security
Long subjected to racial profiling as potential terrorists, Sikhs have now become targets of a physical assault that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation has labeled ‘domestic terrorism’. On 5 Au
Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar
Intimate Atmospheres
This essay explores representations of parasitism and crisis in queer theory and public climate discourse in order to situate queer critiques of reproduction in the context of neoliberalism's ongoing carbon-driven extinctions. Focusing on racialized climate research that predicts the spread of mosquito-borne diseases from South to North in a warming world, the essay argues for the significance of ambient forms of reproduction that move across bot…
More‐Than‐Human and Deeply Human Perspectives on Covid‐19
This multi‐authored contribution explores what the COVID‐19 pandemic demands of critical inquiry with a focus on the more‐than‐human. We show how COVID‐19 is a complex series of multispecies encounters shaped by humans, non‐human animals, and of course viruses. Central to these encounters is a politics of difference in which certain human lives are protected and helped to flourish while others, both human and animal, are forgotten if not sacrific…
Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar
Chimpanzee Sanctuary: "Surplus" Life and the Politics of Transspecies Care
At the outset of the twenty-first century, chimpanzees have become the first nonhuman great ape species to achieve substantial protections in the form of state-recognized legal rights and care programs. In the United States, this development has been institutionalized by the 2000 Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance, and Protection Act, which established the first federally funded system of animal asylum in order to provide humane care for …
Unmodeling Minorities: The Sikh Temple Massacre and the Question of Security
Long subjected to racial profiling as potential terrorists, Sikhs have now become targets of a physical assault that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation has labeled ‘domestic terrorism’. On 5 Au
Herd Racialization and the Inequalities of Immunity
Herd Racialization and the Inequalities of Immunity Neel Ahuja (bio) The COVID-19 pandemic has been the context for public health institutions, epidemiologists, and a range of social scientists to make a public case for an idea concisely stated by the American Medical Association in November 2020: "Racism is a threat to public health."1 While activists and medical historians have long noted inequalities of access and outcomes for patients as well…
Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar
Unmodeling Minorities: The Sikh Temple Massacre and the Question of Security
Long subjected to racial profiling as potential terrorists, Sikhs have now become targets of a physical assault that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation has labeled ‘domestic terrorism’. On 5 Au
Notes on Medicine, Culture, and the History of Imported Monkeys in Puerto Rico
Chimpanzee Sanctuary: "Surplus" Life and the Politics of Transspecies Care
At the outset of the twenty-first century, chimpanzees have become the first nonhuman great ape species to achieve substantial protections in the form of state-recognized legal rights and care programs. In the United States, this development has been institutionalized by the 2000 Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance, and Protection Act, which established the first federally funded system of animal asylum in order to provide humane care for …
Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World
Histories of race and empire have shaped the field imaginary of species studies from its inception. Politically, the field's animal-activist heritage models its critique on movements for racial justice. Historically, this move links to Enlightenment conceptions of animals that relied on the same objectifying methods used to represent slaves and the poor: sentimentality, representations of cruelty, humane manifestos. Epistemologically, the taxonom…
Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect by Mel Y. Chen (review)
Reviewed by: Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect by Mel Y. Chen Neel Ahuja Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, by Mel Y. Chen. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012. Xi + 297 pp. $23.95 paper. ISBN: 978-0-8223-5272-3. To read Mel Chen’s book Animacies is both a challenge and a pleasure, as Chen’s playful text invites readers into a surprising range of themes, methods, and ethical commitments. Thi…
Intimate Atmospheres
This essay explores representations of parasitism and crisis in queer theory and public climate discourse in order to situate queer critiques of reproduction in the context of neoliberalism's ongoing carbon-driven extinctions. Focusing on racialized climate research that predicts the spread of mosquito-borne diseases from South to North in a warming world, the essay argues for the significance of ambient forms of reproduction that move across bot…
Race, Human Security, and the Climate Refugee
Research Article| September 01 2016 Race, Human Security, and the Climate Refugee Neel Ahuja Neel Ahuja University of California, Santa Cruz [email protected] Neel Ahuja is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California-Santa Cruz, where he is a core faculty member in the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program. He is the author of Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government Of Species. His recent writ…
Reversible Human
This article explores the history and practice of rectal feeding, an anachronistic obstetric practice used recently as a form of medical rape in US Central Intelligence Agency prisons. The article outlines how racialized themes of counterterrorist interrogation intersect with behavioralist logics of torture in CIA uses of rectal feeding on Muslim prisoners captured in Pakistan and Afghanistan, linking these prisoners to US security state fears of…
Beyond Trigger Warnings
This roundtable asks what queer studies might offer to an analysis of debates on campus safety. New approaches in queer studies take as their object of study not only sex and gender but also the cultural politics of liberalism; in turn, scholarship on the geopolitics of injury demonstrates the situatedness of both identity and economic forms. Brought together, these scholarly approaches provide an important lens on many of the contradictions of c…
Animal Death as National Debility: Climate, Agriculture, and Syrian War Narrative
Reporting on the Syrian civil war and on Syrian migration to Europe since 2015 often suggests that a drought from 2006–2009 caused an agricultural collapse, spurring rural-to-urban migration and social conflict underpinning the uprisings of 2011. Such narratives regularly focus on the mass death of sheep, goats, and other “livestock” as indexes of the environmental violence underpinning war and migration. Climate security narratives tend to confi…
On Phooka: Beef, Milk, and the Framing of Animal Cruelty in Late Colonial Bengal
Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change in the Twenty-First Century
Neel Ahuja tracks the figure of the climate refugee in public media and policy over the past decade, arguing that journalists, security experts, politicians, and nongovernmental organizations have often oversimplified climate change and obfuscated the processes that drive mass migration. To understand the systemic reasons for displacement, Ahuja argues, it is necessary to reframe climate disaster as interlinked with the history of capitalism and …
More‐Than‐Human and Deeply Human Perspectives on Covid‐19
This multi‐authored contribution explores what the COVID‐19 pandemic demands of critical inquiry with a focus on the more‐than‐human. We show how COVID‐19 is a complex series of multispecies encounters shaped by humans, non‐human animals, and of course viruses. Central to these encounters is a politics of difference in which certain human lives are protected and helped to flourish while others, both human and animal, are forgotten if not sacrific…
Weather as War: Race, Disability, and Environmental Determinism in the Syrian Climate War Thesis
Herd Racialization and the Inequalities of Immunity
Herd Racialization and the Inequalities of Immunity Neel Ahuja (bio) The COVID-19 pandemic has been the context for public health institutions, epidemiologists, and a range of social scientists to make a public case for an idea concisely stated by the American Medical Association in November 2020: "Racism is a threat to public health."1 While activists and medical historians have long noted inequalities of access and outcomes for patients as well…
Attacks on Ethnic Studies
Response to Focus Section
If Cold War competition between the US and the Soviet Union, decolonization of African range states, new international conservation treaties, and changing Indian policies around primate exports determined much of the twentieth-century history of the colonial biomedical primate trade, in the twenty-first century the importance of China as a supplier of the cynomolgus macaque and the rise of Chinese research influence in the life sciences – includi…
Sociology (14 works) · Political science (12 works) · Law (9 works) · Criminology (7 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · History (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Environmental ethics (5 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (5 works) · Colonialism (4 works)