Kenneth Macleish
Biographic Data
| ID | 82814 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kenneth Macleish |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kenneth |
| FAMILY NAME | Macleish |
| SIGNATURE | MACLEISH K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4815-9291 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 121 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1940 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Moral Injury and the Psyche of Counterinsurgency
Public and clinical interest in a condition called moral injury - psychological distress resembling posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but said to originate from shame, guilt, or transgression in war experience - explicitly links moral, psychological, and political dimensions of war-making in the context of the US's post-9/11 wars. This article critically analyzes moral injury's politics of psychological suffering, which tends to treat morality…
Field Notes on the Politics of Veteran Care
The experientially remote, ethically problematic, and 'unthinkable' character of military violence, entrenched in stereotyping and reductive figures of the soldier and veteran, is often taken to represent a fundamental crisis of ethnographic empathy and critique. I argue that this presumption of unbridgeable otherness should itself be a primary target of ethnography, a co-produced interrogation of truth in which ethnographer and subject alike hav…
Churn: Mobilization–demobilization and the fungibility of American military life
This article posits an analytic of mobilization–demobilization that attends to the instrumentalization and fungibility of military lives as both a primary source of embodied war-related harm and an undertheorized logic of the US war-making apparatus. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among post-9/11 military veterans in a US military community, the article explores mobilization–demobilization across three registers. First, I contrast it with domina…
Care and the Nonhuman Politics of Veteran Drunk Driving
Military veteran drunk driving is a field of pathologized behavior in which traces of military excess meet the surveillance and banality of home-front safety. In communities with significant veteran populations, drunk driving blurs the lines between battlefield dangers and more familiar modes of domestic disorderliness, and the deployment of special mechanisms for dealing with law-breaking veterans gives rise to novel combinations of dangerous an…
The Global Psyche: Experiments in the Ethics and Politics of Mental Life
Damaged and Deserving: On Care in a Veteran Treatment Court
In this article, I describe the life-sustaining but inherently coercive labor of care in a veteran treatment court (VTC), a "helping court" in which veterans charged with less-severe offenses can avoid jail by completing a 12- to 18-month therapeutic and rehabilitative program. This privileged medico-legal status is intertwined with the moral economy of military service in the contemporary US and resonates with the politics of American war-making…
How to feel about war: On soldier psyches, military biopolitics, and American empire
On ‘moral injury’: Psychic fringes and war violence
This article is concerned with theories and therapeutic practices that interpret post-traumatic combat stress as a ‘moral injury’ produced by the shock of carrying out lethal violence in uncertain battlefield conditions. While moral injury is said to share many symptoms with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), its proponents – military and Veterans Health Administration clinical psychologists, chaplains, and some psychiatrists – are concerned …
Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms
Four assumptions frequently arise in the aftermath of mass shootings in the United States: (1) that mental illness causes gun violence, (2) that psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime, (3) that shootings represent the deranged acts of mentally ill loners, and (4) that gun control “won’t prevent” another Newtown (Connecticut school mass shooting). Each of these statements is certainly true in particular instances. Yet, as we show, notions of …
The ethnography of good machines
This essay describes a critical approach to the study of military institutions through ethnographic attention to the predicaments of survival, endurance and the management of life exposed to death is that are central to the embodied experience of military personnel. This approach draws attention to the way that the institutionalized practice of war shapes and takes shape in the lives, bodies and feelings most directly bound up in its production a…
Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community
Making War at Fort Hood offers an illuminating look at war through the daily lives of the people whose job it is to produce it. Kenneth MacLeish conducted a year of intensive fieldwork among soldiers and their families at and around the US Army's Fort Hood in central Texas. He shows how war's reach extends far beyond the battlefield into military communities where violence is as routine, boring, and normal as it is shocking and traumatic. Fort Ho…
Armor and Anesthesia: Exposure, Feeling, and the Soldier's Body
For many civilians, the high-tech weapons, armor, and military medicine with which U.S. soldiers are equipped present an image of lethal capacity and physical invulnerability. But, as this article explores, soldiers themselves just as often associate the life-sustaining technology of modern warfare with feelings that range from a pragmatic ambivalence about exposure to harm all the way to profoundly unsettling vulnerability. This article, based o…
Is Empathy a Weapon: Review of Human Terrain
Additional informationNotes on contributorsKenneth MacLeishKenneth MacLeish received his Ph.D. from University of Texas at Austin in 2010 and is a National Institute of Mental Health research fellow at Rutgers University’s Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research. His research examines the everyday impacts of war and military life for American soldiers, their families, and communities, ranging from the embodied experience of de…
The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts edited by Catherine Lutz
The US Military and the Social Life of War
Moencopi Variations from Whorf's Second Mesa Hopi
Notes on Folk Medicine in the Hopi Village of Moenkopi
Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community
Notes on Hopi Belt‐weaving of Moenkopi
Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms
Four assumptions frequently arise in the aftermath of mass shootings in the United States: (1) that mental illness causes gun violence, (2) that psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime, (3) that shootings represent the deranged acts of mentally ill loners, and (4) that gun control “won’t prevent” another Newtown (Connecticut school mass shooting). Each of these statements is certainly true in particular instances. Yet, as we show, notions of …
The ethnography of good machines
This essay describes a critical approach to the study of military institutions through ethnographic attention to the predicaments of survival, endurance and the management of life exposed to death is that are central to the embodied experience of military personnel. This approach draws attention to the way that the institutionalized practice of war shapes and takes shape in the lives, bodies and feelings most directly bound up in its production a…
Armor and Anesthesia: Exposure, Feeling, and the Soldier's Body
For many civilians, the high-tech weapons, armor, and military medicine with which U.S. soldiers are equipped present an image of lethal capacity and physical invulnerability. But, as this article explores, soldiers themselves just as often associate the life-sustaining technology of modern warfare with feelings that range from a pragmatic ambivalence about exposure to harm all the way to profoundly unsettling vulnerability. This article, based o…
On ‘moral injury’: Psychic fringes and war violence
This article is concerned with theories and therapeutic practices that interpret post-traumatic combat stress as a ‘moral injury’ produced by the shock of carrying out lethal violence in uncertain battlefield conditions. While moral injury is said to share many symptoms with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), its proponents – military and Veterans Health Administration clinical psychologists, chaplains, and some psychiatrists – are concerned …
How to feel about war: On soldier psyches, military biopolitics, and American empire
Churn: Mobilization–demobilization and the fungibility of American military life
This article posits an analytic of mobilization–demobilization that attends to the instrumentalization and fungibility of military lives as both a primary source of embodied war-related harm and an undertheorized logic of the US war-making apparatus. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among post-9/11 military veterans in a US military community, the article explores mobilization–demobilization across three registers. First, I contrast it with domina…
The Global Psyche: Experiments in the Ethics and Politics of Mental Life
Damaged and Deserving: On Care in a Veteran Treatment Court
In this article, I describe the life-sustaining but inherently coercive labor of care in a veteran treatment court (VTC), a "helping court" in which veterans charged with less-severe offenses can avoid jail by completing a 12- to 18-month therapeutic and rehabilitative program. This privileged medico-legal status is intertwined with the moral economy of military service in the contemporary US and resonates with the politics of American war-making…
Moral Injury and the Psyche of Counterinsurgency
Public and clinical interest in a condition called moral injury - psychological distress resembling posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but said to originate from shame, guilt, or transgression in war experience - explicitly links moral, psychological, and political dimensions of war-making in the context of the US's post-9/11 wars. This article critically analyzes moral injury's politics of psychological suffering, which tends to treat morality…
Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community
Field Notes on the Politics of Veteran Care
The experientially remote, ethically problematic, and 'unthinkable' character of military violence, entrenched in stereotyping and reductive figures of the soldier and veteran, is often taken to represent a fundamental crisis of ethnographic empathy and critique. I argue that this presumption of unbridgeable otherness should itself be a primary target of ethnography, a co-produced interrogation of truth in which ethnographer and subject alike hav…
Care and the Nonhuman Politics of Veteran Drunk Driving
Military veteran drunk driving is a field of pathologized behavior in which traces of military excess meet the surveillance and banality of home-front safety. In communities with significant veteran populations, drunk driving blurs the lines between battlefield dangers and more familiar modes of domestic disorderliness, and the deployment of special mechanisms for dealing with law-breaking veterans gives rise to novel combinations of dangerous an…
Is Empathy a Weapon: Review of Human Terrain
Additional informationNotes on contributorsKenneth MacLeishKenneth MacLeish received his Ph.D. from University of Texas at Austin in 2010 and is a National Institute of Mental Health research fellow at Rutgers University’s Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research. His research examines the everyday impacts of war and military life for American soldiers, their families, and communities, ranging from the embodied experience of de…
The US Military and the Social Life of War
Notes on Hopi Belt‐weaving of Moenkopi
Notes on Hopi Belt‐weaving of Moenkopi
Notes on Folk Medicine in the Hopi Village of Moenkopi
Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community
Moencopi Variations from Whorf's Second Mesa Hopi
The US Military and the Social Life of War
The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts edited by Catherine Lutz
Is Empathy a Weapon: Review of Human Terrain
Additional informationNotes on contributorsKenneth MacLeishKenneth MacLeish received his Ph.D. from University of Texas at Austin in 2010 and is a National Institute of Mental Health research fellow at Rutgers University’s Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research. His research examines the everyday impacts of war and military life for American soldiers, their families, and communities, ranging from the embodied experience of de…
Armor and Anesthesia: Exposure, Feeling, and the Soldier's Body
For many civilians, the high-tech weapons, armor, and military medicine with which U.S. soldiers are equipped present an image of lethal capacity and physical invulnerability. But, as this article explores, soldiers themselves just as often associate the life-sustaining technology of modern warfare with feelings that range from a pragmatic ambivalence about exposure to harm all the way to profoundly unsettling vulnerability. This article, based o…
Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community
Making War at Fort Hood offers an illuminating look at war through the daily lives of the people whose job it is to produce it. Kenneth MacLeish conducted a year of intensive fieldwork among soldiers and their families at and around the US Army's Fort Hood in central Texas. He shows how war's reach extends far beyond the battlefield into military communities where violence is as routine, boring, and normal as it is shocking and traumatic. Fort Ho…
Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms
Four assumptions frequently arise in the aftermath of mass shootings in the United States: (1) that mental illness causes gun violence, (2) that psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime, (3) that shootings represent the deranged acts of mentally ill loners, and (4) that gun control “won’t prevent” another Newtown (Connecticut school mass shooting). Each of these statements is certainly true in particular instances. Yet, as we show, notions of …
The ethnography of good machines
This essay describes a critical approach to the study of military institutions through ethnographic attention to the predicaments of survival, endurance and the management of life exposed to death is that are central to the embodied experience of military personnel. This approach draws attention to the way that the institutionalized practice of war shapes and takes shape in the lives, bodies and feelings most directly bound up in its production a…
How to feel about war: On soldier psyches, military biopolitics, and American empire
On ‘moral injury’: Psychic fringes and war violence
This article is concerned with theories and therapeutic practices that interpret post-traumatic combat stress as a ‘moral injury’ produced by the shock of carrying out lethal violence in uncertain battlefield conditions. While moral injury is said to share many symptoms with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), its proponents – military and Veterans Health Administration clinical psychologists, chaplains, and some psychiatrists – are concerned …
Churn: Mobilization–demobilization and the fungibility of American military life
This article posits an analytic of mobilization–demobilization that attends to the instrumentalization and fungibility of military lives as both a primary source of embodied war-related harm and an undertheorized logic of the US war-making apparatus. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among post-9/11 military veterans in a US military community, the article explores mobilization–demobilization across three registers. First, I contrast it with domina…
Care and the Nonhuman Politics of Veteran Drunk Driving
Military veteran drunk driving is a field of pathologized behavior in which traces of military excess meet the surveillance and banality of home-front safety. In communities with significant veteran populations, drunk driving blurs the lines between battlefield dangers and more familiar modes of domestic disorderliness, and the deployment of special mechanisms for dealing with law-breaking veterans gives rise to novel combinations of dangerous an…
The Global Psyche: Experiments in the Ethics and Politics of Mental Life
Damaged and Deserving: On Care in a Veteran Treatment Court
In this article, I describe the life-sustaining but inherently coercive labor of care in a veteran treatment court (VTC), a "helping court" in which veterans charged with less-severe offenses can avoid jail by completing a 12- to 18-month therapeutic and rehabilitative program. This privileged medico-legal status is intertwined with the moral economy of military service in the contemporary US and resonates with the politics of American war-making…
Field Notes on the Politics of Veteran Care
The experientially remote, ethically problematic, and 'unthinkable' character of military violence, entrenched in stereotyping and reductive figures of the soldier and veteran, is often taken to represent a fundamental crisis of ethnographic empathy and critique. I argue that this presumption of unbridgeable otherness should itself be a primary target of ethnography, a co-produced interrogation of truth in which ethnographer and subject alike hav…
Moral Injury and the Psyche of Counterinsurgency
Public and clinical interest in a condition called moral injury - psychological distress resembling posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but said to originate from shame, guilt, or transgression in war experience - explicitly links moral, psychological, and political dimensions of war-making in the context of the US's post-9/11 wars. This article critically analyzes moral injury's politics of psychological suffering, which tends to treat morality…
Political science (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Criminology (7 works) · History (7 works) · Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Research (7 works) · Medicine (6 works)