أمير عزيز
selected talks and lectures

Recentering the Maghreb: Insights into Protest and Their Transnational Impacts
The Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies and Security In Context
December 5, 2024, University of California, Santa Barbara
North Africa, and particularly the Maghreb, has long been relegated to the margins of global discourse. However, recentering the region offers a valuable lens to understand how the histories of protest in the Maghreb are intricately connected to broader global movements. Recentering the Maghreb enables an understanding of protest at both local and global levels, highlighting the interconnectedness of regimes in the region, as well as invites critical reflection on how regimes have historically responded to these movements and how movements have adapted.​
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Dr. Amir Aziz discusses how the 2019 Algerian protests, or the Hirak, emerged after decades of economic abandonment and political corruption by the governing class. Dr. Samia Errazouki focuses on providing a longue durée of the social mobilizations in
Morocco's Rif region and the global reverberations of that history. Ahmed Jemaa rounds up the discussion by focusing on social movements in post-2011 Tunisia, particularly in the specific period of 2015-2018 and the experience of the youth-led movement Manich Msamah (I Will Not Forgive).
Debility, Disablement, and Toxic Entanglements in America's Perpetual War
Afterlives of Empire: Debility, Disability, Damage, Discourse
American Studies Association Annual Conference 2024
November 15, 2024, Baltimore, MD
Dr. Amir Aziz ​examines the toxic material and affective afterlives of U.S. empire and occupation in contemporary Afghanistan. Drawing from disability studies, affect theory, animal studies, and decolonial theory, Dr. Aziz looks at how U.S. military burn pits, landmines, and toxic chemicals have not only debilitated Afghan lives but devitalized Afghanistan’s biodiverse landscape, affecting soil, farmland, air, water, and non-human ecosystems and species.
From the debilitating chemical and radioactive toxicities left in Afghanistan to the mass disablement and toxification of human and environment in Iraq, Libya, Palestine, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen due to Global North military occupations, Dr. Aziz challenges the dominance of liberal disability rights frameworks that privilege the white, disabled body of the Global North hailed through a neoliberal politics of recognition.
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The Mauritanian: A Conversation with Mohamedou Ould Slahi
Special Two Day Event: Guantánamo 22 Years In
January 18, 2024, University of California, Berkeley Law School
Dr. Amir Aziz and Mohamedou Ould Slahi engage in conversation, with Slahi discussing his life post-Guantánamo.​ A Mauritanian citizen, Mohamedou was detained at Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp for fourteen years without any charges ever filed. Mohamedou was subjected to ‘Enhanced lnterrogation Techniques’ - torture, essentially - that included sleep deprivation, stress positions, solitary confinement. Such means of enhanced interrogation were approved by Donald Rumsfeld and backed by controversial legal memos, colloquially termed the ‘Torture Memos,’ written by John Yoo and signed by Jay Bybee of the Office of Legal Counsel.
With help from his attorney Nancy Hollander, Mohamedou gained his freedom in 2016. His memoir Guantánamo Diary, written while at the military prison, has since been republished unredacted in 2016 and become a national bestseller.
Witnesses of the Unseen: Lakhdar Boumediène and the Legacy of Boumediène v. Bush
Special Two Day Event: Guantánamo 22 Years In
January 17, 2024, University of California, Berkeley
Lakhdar Boumediène, with Dr. Amir Aziz, Dan Norland, and Lynne C. Soutter, speaks about lessons we should learn from what he endured at Guantánamo and how he ultimately won a landmark Supreme Court case and his freedom.
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An Algerian citizen, Lakhdar Boumediène was a charitable aid worker for the Red Crescent Society in Bosnia in early 2002 when the U.S. kidnapped and renditioned him to Guantánamo. In 2008, he won the Supreme Court case Boumediène v. Bush, which held that Guantánamo detainees have a habeas corpus right to challenge their detention in court. ​
Captive Intelligence: Anti-Muslim Racism, Extractive Capital & Liberal Humanism in the Making of Muslim Immigrant Informants
The Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies
May 14, 2024, University of California, Santa Barbara
In this invited talk, Dr. Amir Aziz discusses various post-9/11 informant recruitment programs that have enlisted Muslim immigrants as counter-terrorism intelligence informants across the New York City metropolitan area.
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Despite how cases like Hassan v. City of New York and FBI v. Fazaga have attempted to end the suspicionless surveillance and intelligence recruitment of Muslims, such practices are informally authorized outside the judicial purview. The impossibility of subjects to seek redress further underlines the limits of humanist protocols of liberal rights and representation, pointing to how such gendered/racialized practices of violability and containment are constitutive to liberal modernity’s conception of the human subject.
Gender & Anti-Muslim Racism in the Making of Muslim Immigrant Informants in New York City
Department of Gender & Women's Studies
November 13, 2023, University of California, Berkeley
In this autumn research event, Dr. Amir Aziz and Dr. Elena Vasiliou each share their ongoing book projects, which take place at the intersections of carceral studies, gender studies, queer theory, and decolonial theory.
Dr. Aziz discusses how post-9/11 informant recruitment programs have enlisted Muslim immigrants as counter-terrorism intelligence informants across the New York City metropolitan area. Dr. Vasiliou draws from previous work on pleasure in prison settings to argue for the application of queer and decolonial methodologies as a means of deconstructing the binary formation through which pain and pleasure in prison is understood.

The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism and Algerians of New Caledonia/Kanaky
American Studies Association Annual Conference
November 10, 2019, Honolulu, Hawai'i
Dr. Amir Aziz examines how settler-colonial practices in Kanaky/New Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean, possessed by France as part of its colonial overseas collectivity system, have impacted Kanak, the indigenous Melanesian population.
Dr. Aziz discusses how the Algerians of Kanaky/New Caledonia, also known as the Kabyles du Pacifique (Kabyles of the Pacific), despite settling as forced deportees and colonial subjects of French empire, have contributed to the subsequent French settler occupation of the Oceanic territory. The biopolitical relation between settler Algerians and indigenous Kanak is a settler colonial interaction under-explored in much historical, geopolitical, and cultural studies of settler colonialism in the Pacific Ocean.
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The overall implications of Dr. Aziz's work are threefold: First, it complicates dominant racialized conceptions of settler coloniality in considering how the Algerian, formerly a racialized colonial subject, acquires settler subjectivity through legal inclusion and inter-generational assimilation. Second, Dr. Aziz shows that settler colonialism in Kanaky/New Caledonia and the Pacific Ocean is not a distant and archived past, but an ever-present reality that continues to impact Kanak. Third, Dr. Aziz argues for a need to expand understandings of the geopolitical and historical impact of settler colonialism, as even colonized subjects of empire may become globally mobile and participate in projects of settler colonialism in other localities.
No-Go Zones, Sexuality Politics, and the Figure of the Terrorist Indigène
10th Annual Islamophobia Conference: Virtual Internment: Islamophobia, Surveillance and Unequal Citizenship
April 19, 2019, University of California, Berkeley Law School
Dr. Amir Aziz discusses anti-Muslim representations of the so-called terrorist indigène in the French context -- a racialized figure often registered via a set of neo-Orientalist tropes ranging from the troubled minority youth from the impoverished banlieues vulnerable to the persuasive sway of religious fundamentalism, and the sexually-perverse Islamist who poses an internal threat to national security.
The pre-emptive overdetermination of Muslims as male, Arab, misogynist, and sexually-intolerant suggests broader sexualized anxieties in the French internalist imaginary regarding the porosity of its borders, laissez-faire approaches to immigration policies, and the prospect of changing populational demographics in contemporary France.
Beyond Bandung du Nord: Towards a Decolonial Praxis of Revolutionary Love
The Future of African Studies Symposium, Center for African Studies
September 28, 2018, Rutgers University - New Brunswick
In this invited talk, Dr. Amir Aziz speaks about the question of epistemology and knowledge production — how the frameworks we deploy and the questions we ask in our research paradigms and praxis are inextricably connected to institutionalized nodes of power that surround academic, intellectual, and revolutionary practice. Drawing from decolonial African and Arab thinkers, Dr. Aziz points to the multiplicity of decolonial solidarities and relationships between Black, Indigenous, African, Roma, Islamic, Latin American, and Palestinian communities. Dr. Aziz argues that epistemology allows us to foreground the need to challenge how some of most-cherished contemporary narratives and frameworks have emerged from histories of empire and exploitation — structures of power and knowledge that champion a Western teleological narrative of progressive liberalism, secularism, and universalism.​​