Monday, October 10, 2005
How to Build a War: The Post 9/11 Construction of Inevitability
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How did the war on terror get translated into the war on Saddam Hussein? Steven Williams, assistant professor of sociology, will present "How to Build a War: The Post 9/11 Construction of Inevitability" at 3:30 p.m. Friday, October 28, in Kleymeyer Hall in the Liberal Arts Center. The lecture is part of the Liberal Arts Faculty Colloquium, a free lecture series featuring faculty research in the College of Liberal Arts. “In the post 9/11 climate, we launched ourselves on this supposed war on terror,” Williams said. “The idea is to make us safe from global terrorism, and I’m curious about how the mission to keep us safe from terrorism became the mission to affect regime change in Iraq. “How was that sense of immediacy and inevitability constructed for us? Before this process went into effect, nobody was talking about going to war in Iraq, and yet somehow, right before our eyes, this sense of inevitability was constructed for us so that people were saying, ‘of course we must go.’ How did that happen in a relatively short period of time?” Williams said he will try to avoid discussion about whether it was right to go to war. “People have very strong opinions about it. It’s an emotional topic. This is not about the morality of going to war, or whether we should have. It’s about the process by which we become mobilized for war as a society.” His lecture will include discussion of the relationship between social solidarity and mobilizing for war; the relationship between the government and the media in the construction of inevitability; and the concept of what ideological bias might exist in media. Williams holds a Ph.D. from Carleton University, and an M.A. and B.A. from University of Alberta. For more information, contact Teresa Huerta, associate professor of Spanish, at 812/465-7053. |
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