The Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation is proud to welcome three Deakin University Postdoctoral Research Fellows to Deakin University, Dr Mia Martin Hobbs, Dr Michael Lazarus and Dr Christopher O’Neill.
The Deakin University Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (DUPRF), formerly known as Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellowships, support and develop early career researchers identified as potential rising stars, to enhance the capacity and capability in key research areas and build the next generation of high-achieving and internationally competitive researchers.
About Dr Mia Martin Hobbs
Mia is an oral historian of war and its legacies, with a focus on memory, trauma, place, gender, peace and security, and anti-war activism. Her research explores the global consequences of wars through the stories of individuals who survived them. Mia completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2018, where she taught modern US and international history, and since 2021 has been working at Deakin as a research fellow on an ARC project about the history of national security in Australia. She has published research in Australian Journal of Politics & History, History Australia, Journal of American History and The Oral History Review, and her first book, Return to Vietnam: An Oral History of American and Australian Veterans’ Journeys (Cambridge University Press, 2021) won the Oral History Australia Book Award in 2022.
About Mia’s Project
After 9/11, Western militaries agreed that force alone would not defeat the spectre of global terrorism. The US, UK, and Australian militaries all set out new doctrine emphasizing that moral military conduct was critical to effective counterinsurgency. Rhetorically, the War on Terror was positioned as defending democratic values: the Bush Administration claimed the war in Afghanistan would ‘liberate’ Muslim women. Yet the War on Terror was characterised by the weaponization of race and gender by Western militaries. Military policies dehumanized enemies, allies, and civilians alike, leading to torture and civilian deaths. In military prisons, the gender of women soldiers was exploited to degrade and violate detainees.
Further complicating this tension was the soldier-force deployed to the War on Terror – the most diverse force ever deployed by Western militaries. While US, UK, and Australian militaries promoted diversity as a strategic strength, women and minority soldiers faced epidemics of sexual violence and racism within their ranks. Drawing on oral history methods, this project examines how women and minority veterans make sense of their experiences as victims and perpetrators of gendered and racialized violence.
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