Moderator: Vasuki Nesiah

NYU, Kevorkian Center, 50 Washington Square South. Details here.

What does it mean to be haunted by loss? Since the drone attacks began in 2004, the borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan have been the subject of heated discussion by journalists and pundits. Yet, the people who actually live there and survive the aftermath of American policies are rarely heard from.

Wounds of Waziristan, a short documentary by filmmaker Madiha Tahir, tells the haunting stories of those directly impacted by US drone attacks in Pakistan. Wounds gets beyond the legal debate to focus on drone survivors, ordinary people who persist in extraordinary conditions. In their own words, the drone affectees narrate what it is to live with loss and among the rubble left in the wake of a drone attack. Wounds injects the voices of those who have been labeled as “militants” or dismissed as “collateral damage” into the public debate on the US ‘war on terror.’

Madiha Tahir is an independent journalist and a doctoral candidate at Columbia University working on liberalism, media narratives and war in the context of US drone attacks on Pakistan. Her journalistic work has appeared in several media outlets including PRI/BBC’s “The World”, Foreign Affairs, VICE, Democracy Now!, The New Inquiry, Guernica, The Wall Street Journal, Caravan, The National(UAE), Global Post, Left Turn, and The Columbia Journalism Review, among others. She has also co-edited a volume of essays Dispatches from Pakistan with Vijay Prashad and Qalandar Bux Memon and is one of the founding editors for Tanqeed.org.

Co-Sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and New York University

NYU Co-Sponsors: The Gallatin School of Individualized Study; Department of Media, Culture and Communication; Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies; Center for Media, Culture and History; Asian/Pacific American Institute