On Contesting and Dismantling the Forever War: An Interview with Ronak K. Kapadia
By Zaynab Hilal
Ronak K. Kapadia is a queer cultural theorist of race, war, and empire. His research on the world-making potential of contemporary Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic artists in response to the “Global War on Terror” established the curatorial framework for Surviving the Long Wars. In this interview, the curator and interdisciplinary scholar, discusses this research and his recent book Insurgent Aesthetics that draws inspiration from the turbulent and violent aftermath of September 11, 2001 and the lineages of twenty-first century art activism.
Ronak K. Kapadia in front of From Manila to Baghdad, 2023, by Gregory Rick at the Surviving the Long Wars: Unlikely Entanglements exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center.
Courtesy of Ronak K. Kapadia.
Zaynab Hilal (ZH): In Insurgent Aesthetics you define “forever war” as a critical way to “describe the seemingly permanent US-led war on terror” following the events of September 11, 2001. Could you elaborate on what you mean by this concept of forever war and whether it can be applied to contexts outside of contemporary US military involvement? Is this concept exclusively for Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporas?
Ronak Kapadia (RK): In the book I argue that the forever war is not only a historical period describing a series of geopolitical and military conflicts, but also an ongoing archival project, a structure of feeling, and production of knowledge for interpreting and acting on the geopolitical alignments of the US during the broader “post”-Cold War era. I tried to capture the fantasy sense of temporal perpetuity in wartime’s violence that US military strategists have brought to their varied global projects of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism in the twenty-first century, as well as a broader sense of how the US has been at war in an uninterrupted manner since its inception. In fact, as Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz points out in her Surviving the Long Wars lecture, the seeds of what constitutes the twenty-first century “Global War on Terror” were laid during the founding of the United States. These seeds grow throughout the “Late Cold War” period of the 1970s across the Greater Middle East. Whether it's the US proxy wars in Afghanistan, the military coups in Iran, or the US funding and financing of the settler colonial occupation of Palestine, the US neo-colonial engagement with the Greater Middle East far exceeds the post-9/11 period.
And yet what often happens when we talk about the events of the contemporary “War on Terror” is that we lose any sense of these older mid-to-late twentieth century histories, let alone the centuries-long devastations of settler colonial violence that laid the foundation for the modern US empire. For instance, when we think back to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, folks don’t even recall the Persian Gulf War of the early 1990s, let alone these earlier iterations I’m naming, which were full of sanctions and proxy wars in addition to overt, violent military action.
“We need alternatives to that story that will actually replenish our political imaginations about how to think and feel about the social world and to challenge the ethical and political logics that continue to sustain US war economies. ”
Part of the idea of forever war, then, is to capture how that dominant story about this shape-shifting assemblage of late modern warfare and counterterrorism has always been a lie. We need alternatives to that story that will actually replenish our political imaginations about how to think and feel about the social world and to challenge the ethical and political logics that continue to sustain US war economies. My book analyzes contemporary art and aesthetic responses to the differential strategies of neoliberal security that define the forever war, a suite that includes mass incarceration and detention, border walls and mass deportations, electronic surveillance and drone wars, and the rapid growth of police, prison, border patrol, military, and intelligence forces.
While Insurgent Aesthetics focuses on the historical present, it offers what I consider a queer poetics of relationality to understand violent settler colonial histories of settlement, land theft, Native genocide, African chattel slavery, and Asian exploitation as wholly vital to not only what scholar Lisa Lowe names the “intimacies of four continents,” but also the genealogy of the contemporary forever war. These braided histories of violence and their material afterlives are imprinted onto the DNA of the forever war and in the very practices of state violence that the artists in my book interrogate in their creative works. Without understanding these deeper histories, how can we confront what’s in front of us? This is precisely why the work of minoritarian and diasporic artists who make palpable the repressed legacies of US global state violence through their art-making is paramount.
“Without understanding these deeper histories, how can we confront what’s in front of us?”
Mahwish Chishty, Untitled, 2013. Gouache, tea stain, and photo transfers on Masonite.
Photo by Anne Ryan.
ZH: What prompted your interest in writing specifically about Arabs, Muslims, and South Asian art activists in the US and Europe, and how are these communities impacted by these wars?
RK: I chose to focus on the aesthetics and politics of these communities and the transnational networks of subjugated knowledge, affect, and affiliation they have forged during the forever war period for three principal reasons. First, the vast majority of the artists under investigation in my book trace their origins back to numerous countries across the Greater Middle East and South Asia, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Palestine. They comprise multiple geographic, religious, and supranational ethnic identities, and this relational lens captures how the events of 9/11 have collided with older histories of imperialism, gendered racism, heteropatriarchy, neoliberal capitalism, Islamophobia, and US Orientalism while also amplifying newer modes of twenty-first century anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian, and anti-South Asian racisms. Second, a focus on the visionary, world-making potential of contemporary art and aesthetics in the context of US war and empire has been sorely under investigated in the scholarly literature on Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporas. I was hoping that the book could intervene by centering the social potential of aesthetics as a queer feminist fugitive strategy for critiquing politics and reimagining collective social life under conditions of surveillance and securitization. Third, while many of the artists I study have risen to prominence in the fine art world over the past decade, they remain largely understudied in visual culture, art history, and performance studies. Insurgent Aesthetics contributes to these scholarly and academic fields by explicitly highlighting the work of contemporary Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic queer feminist cultural producers as indispensable to both US/North American and international art worlds and markets alike. We featured many of these artists in the Surviving the Long Wars exhibitions, including Mahwish Chishty, Sabba Elahi, Chitra Ganesh, Mariam Ghani, and Rajkamal Kahlon.
Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, 2023. From left to right: Rajkamal Kahlon, works from the Did You Kiss the Dead Body? series, 2023; Gina Herrera, A Virtuous Warrior and A Whimsical Diva, 2023; Michael Rakowitz, The invisible enemy should not exist, 2018; Gerald Sheffield, fm 3-05.301 (from ptsd series), 2016.
Photo by James Prinz.
ZH: You make an important point about the legacies of violence that structure contemporary understandings of US warfare. What connections have you noticed between the “Indian Wars” and the “Global War on Terror”? How has resistance and solidarity impacted your work?
RK: I am deeply invested in the possibility of transnational and intersectional coalitions and tracing the unlikely alliances between people who might not have seen themselves in solidarity with each other previously. This is an important ethical and political principle for the overlapping struggles that face us today. Many racialized and Indigenous peoples have been targeted by contemporary US global war-making and thus experience different degrees of precarity, vulnerability, suffering, and risk in relation to the US national security state. One of the central goals of my book was to link domestic racial politics of Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians in the US, in particular, to overseas wars and occupations in the Greater Middle East. Building on a major shift in comparative American and ethnic studies toward the postcolonial study of the US, the book investigates the intimacies between internal structures and processes of the US empire at “home” and external histories of imperial rule “abroad.” For instance, I asked, “how can we characterize the overlapping forms of solidarity between Arabs, Muslims, and South Asian communities that emerged in the West after the events of 9/11, and can we connect those shared struggles to the longer histories of Black, race-radical, and Native-led insurgent rebellion in the United States?” Native and Black peoples in the US have been struggling against the dominant security order for centuries in ways that continue to inspire and inform the work of contemporary global movements and struggles against militarism and securitization.
Surviving the Long Wars: Residues and Rebellions exhibition at the Newberry Library, 2023. From left to right: Terran Last Gun, The ancient people of the West live on, 2021 and 10,000 journeys around the sun with moon, 2021; Unattributed photograph with caption, “Roberta Blackgoat of Big Mountain is one of the organizers of the march in support of Navajo JUA (Joint Use Area) residents,” Akwesasne Notes, 1979; Mahwish Chishty, Untitled, 2013.
Photo by Anne Ryan.
By putting into synergetic dialogue the parallels between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “American Indian wars” and the twenty-first century “Global War on Terror,” we can think more deeply about the points of convergence and divergence between these two conflicts, which are rarely talked about in mainstream discourse as having anything to do with each other.
“The US military understands these militarized residues of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century settler colonialism intimately; our present-day anti-war and anti-imperialist struggles must as well.”
As we’ve seen in our scholarly seminar series this year, however, there is immense overlap between these military conflicts and the racialized and Indigenous communities devastated by these violent imperial histories. It’s not simply the fact that Indigenous terms have been appropriated by the US in its operations of special forces and military campaigns. For example, the operation that targeted and killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011 was called “Operation Geronimo,” named after the prominent Apache insurgent leader. The US military understands these militarized residues of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century settler colonialism intimately; our present-day anti-war and anti-imperialist struggles must as well. That’s part of what we’re trying to conjure and mobilize into greater public consciousness among contemporary war resisters and their accomplices through our seminar series and broader curatorial project.
Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, 2023. Left and center: Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh, Index of the Disappeared: Parasitic Archive, 2014; Right: Mariam Ghani, The Trespassers. 2011.
Photo by Eric Perez.
ZH: Thank you for highlighting these connections. Why are these “intimacies-across-difference” important when discussing these forever wars?
RK: The language of “intimacies-across-difference” that we’ve used throughout this project is a concept that proliferates most precisely in the field of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies, and specifically in women of color feminism and queer of color criticism. “Intimacies” generally means private and domestic, and yet as feminist theorists have taught us, we need to consistently explore and deconstruct the relationship between publics and privates, especially when considering projects of the US military and the homeland security state.
This language was elevated by queer feminist scholars of comparative racialization and empire studies over the past two decades. Whenever we talk about issues of race and indigeneity some will argue, “Well, this war is about race and colonialism and empire. It’s not really about gender and sexuality per se.” But, of course, it is always also about all of those things, including gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and beyond. It is about sexual and gender-based violence and experiences of gender and sexuality as categories that are re-animated through violent histories of war, racism, and empire that have also led to endless maiming and debilitation.
In my book, I try to remain really attentive to this sort of intersectional analysis, hence the “queer life of forever war.” Queerness becomes a useful heuristic or analytic frame through which to understand these complex archives. By asserting the sign and method of queerness centrally within this project and in my research more generally, I try to bring the intellectual and political tools from queer of color and queer diasporic critique—intersectionality and assemblage theory and an attention to embodiment, sensation, and aesthetics—to address violent transformations in the ongoing legacies of US empire. It’s a form of queer feminist curation that I think is running throughout our project, even if it’s not always stated. I hope that we have made that commitment to queer feminist and decolonial and anti-imperialist praxis even more explicit in the context of Surviving the Long Wars.
Sabba Elahi (left) speaks with Andrea Assaf (right) during Elahi’s Drone Stories Embroidery Circle during the Veteran Art Summit at the Hyde Park Art Center, 2023.
Photo by Daniel King.
ZH: Can you say more about curating Surviving the Long Wars and the connections between the “American Indian Wars” and the “Global War on Terror”? Despite their differences, do you believe that the survivors and descendants of these major US-led wars have similarities in terms of themes of resilience and solidarity with other impacted communities, including veterans?
RK: If we think of US-based South Asian and SWANA (South West Asian and North African) activism as part of a longer lineage of shared struggle, then we can start to think differently about what it means to contest and dismantle the forever war. That’s precisely what I think we are attempting with the NEH-funded Surviving the Long Wars project. We are putting these twin “forever wars” into conversation with a longer genealogy of US settler colonial invasion, occupation, and genocide against Indigenous peoples in the New World alongside this period of twentieth-first-century militarization that continues to this day. We’re talking about a complex coalition, an amalgamation of shared struggles. One of the hallmarks of any organizing and solidarity-building is meeting folks where they’re at and creating campaigns or creative work that tries to understand the commonalities and differences across and among groups as they address the problems they face. That’s something I hope that we have explored thoroughly in this Veteran Art Triennial and Summit—namely, the heterogeneity of racialized and Indigenous communities themselves.
We know that native folks are not a monolith and neither are all of the survivors and impacted communities of the GWOT, including veterans of these wars!
We’ve talked a lot about how the voices of anti-war activists and artists who also happen to be veterans have often been sidelined or marginalized within veteran discourses in the national public consciousness since the Vietnam War era. Even in all of these recent twenty-year retrospectives of the GWOT, we rarely get to hear the voices of folks that Aaron Hughes has been building alongside, with the emerging Veteran Art Movement. What does it mean to bring together lots of disparate coalitional categories? How do we activate and hold space for these differences and heterogeneity when curating veteran art and culture? That’s some of the most exciting questions we’re pursuing together.
Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center, 2023.
Photo by Daniel King.
ZH: As a queer cultural theorist who writes about contemporary art and activism, why are you interested in working with BIPOC veterans? What role do veteran artists play in documenting or dismantling the forever war?
RK: As academics, I think we have much to learn about how questions of race, indigeneity, colonization, war, and survival are lived daily from our engagement with on-the-ground movement activists working to build the leadership and power of minoritized communities as well as veterans of US wars, many of whom come from these impacted groups themselves.
It is not often that BIPOC veterans get to sit down with BIPOC artists and academics to think about the needs of these overlapping communities and reflect on the legacies of US military conflicts. Veteran artists play a hugely impactful role in society in calling attention to the ongoing legacies of wartime violence. I feel grateful for the opportunity to learn from all of the veterans we have assembled in this project. My experiences with Aaron during his 2018 NEH-funded grad seminar at UIC that culminated in the first Veteran Art Triennial in 2019 made me feel especially excited to take on a bigger role in the project this time around. Aaron has a remarkable skill of growing the leadership of the people he works alongside. The process of co-curation with Aaron and our entire team of fabulous collaborators has been such a salve during this pandemic period.
Gerald Sheffield speaking during the Surviving the Long Wars: Reckon and Reimagine exhibition walkthrough during the Veteran Art Summit at the Chicago Cultural Center, 2023.
Photo by Daniel King.
This is why I’m especially excited about how we have collaborated with BIPOC veterans of the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who are making art about their experiences in combat and the modes of solidarity they have forged as war resisters in the years since their military service. By spotlighting the complex experiences of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color veterans, our project is motivated both by innovations in the scholarly fields of comparative and relational ethnic studies as well as the glaring absence of Native/Indigenous studies on our campus, despite the preponderance of urban Native Americans who live in the Chicagoland region.
Through our project, we have been trying to forge deeper relationships with Native and Indigenous artists, educators, and activists, including many veterans, which has enriched our explorations of interdisciplinary scholarship in our collective fields. So often, critical race and Indigenous studies scholarship continues to be maligned in both academic and in public/popular discourse. We are hoping to foreground how an intersectional approach to the dissemination of critical race and Indigenous thought–alongside these innovations in critical ethnic studies, transnational American studies, and Middle Eastern studies, offers a sophisticated analysis of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, warfare, and empire, and how these phenomena are lived and felt every day. I think it can serve as a model and template for many other collaborative projects to come.
ZH: Your book mentions the approaching future of drone surveillance used by US police reflecting and mirroring the surveillance of the US military. You also cite a podcast interview between scholar Priya Kandaswamy and the University of New South Wales’ Media Futures Project, writing, “military and policing are two sides of the same coin of global repression and racial capitalism.” If this connection was known more widely, do you believe the public would react and push hastily for police and prison reform? Do you think there would be action to end US military presence overseas?
RK: This is a really important question, Zaynab. I think that an analysis of the late imperial project of drone warfare and the global surveillance regime provides ample illustration of how to build forms of solidarity that connect the domestic and foreign contexts of US war-making. This is especially crucial for scholar-activists like me who are concerned with tracing the links between the US domestic policing and prison expansion, which disproportionately targets poor people of color, and the newly emergent global prison archipelago that primarily enfolds empire’s gendered racialized Others in the Global South and is part and parcel of the US global “War on Terror.” I think we’re now living through a moment in the US where there is actually a lot of public consciousness around the limits of domestic prisons and policing. As a result of the efflorescence of the Black freedom struggle and the Movement for Black Lives, we have a lot of public awareness about the role that domestic police play in propagating state violence in the US, specifically against Black and Brown poor people. That's why we have organizing slogans like “Defund the Police” and a broader (prison and police) abolition movement that is gaining traction across the country and getting everyday people to think deeply about the role of the carceral apparatus as structuring the distribution of power, resources, and life chances in US society. Black feminist abolitionists have convincingly and assiduously made the argument that we need to reallocate resources away from the policing and enforcement mechanisms of the state back into programs that support the social wage and remake our worlds.
However, that abolitionist consciousness is perhaps less readily exported to the global ends of the carceral state, i.e. the warfare state. We need to popularize the idea of “Defunding the Pentagon,” for instance, where we’re spending billions and billions of dollars annually to propagate endless wars all over the world including at our militarized borders. There is so much bipartisan consensus in this nation about investing in war economies in ways that have been absolutely ruinous for US Americans for successive generations. So yes!
“Militarism and policing are two heads of the same coin, and we desperately need to grow public consciousness about this fact.”
Militarism and policing are two heads of the same coin, and we desperately need to grow public consciousness about this fact. This is why youth organizing in this space is so crucial—including groups like Dissenters, the Chicago-based anti-militarism collective with local chapters across the country that is working to dismantle wartime economies. Let’s follow their lead!
Darrell Wayne Fair, Self Portrait, 2022. Pencil, colored pencil, acrylic paint, and ink on ledger paper.
Courtesy of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project.
The last thing I will say about this moment of abolitionist possibility in the US/domestic arena is that every glimmer of freedom-expansion in this nation from Emancipation/Black Reconstruction onwards has been followed by a sustained period of white supremacist revanchism or backlash. That is true throughout our history and as the abolitionist scholar Dylan Rodriguez rightly names, we are living through a decades-long period of “White Reconstruction.” How we respond collectively to this fact is yet to be determined, but it’s important to name it as such and look to our social movements on the margins for clues.
ZH: I completely agree: movements toward liberation are often met with resistance. Backlash can be overwhelming, but it’s important to remember why each person fights for their cause. What inspired you to begin dissecting, defining, and redefining the connection between war and art in the Arab, Muslim, and South Asian Diaspora?
RK: I started college just weeks after 9/11. My critical energies were invested both in the complex historical moment in which many in my generation came into consciousness as young scholar-activists and artists in the United States—namely, the events surrounding 9/11 and the ensuing decades of struggle around civil liberties, militarized policing at home, and endless warfare abroad. It also coincided with a period of tremendous political and cultural organizing in urban South Asian diasporic communities, specifically around GWOT-issues of detention, deportation, and police violence that were happening before and after 9/11.
When I moved to New York City in 2005 after college, I quickly came into contact with dozens of radical South Asian American lawyers, artists, activists, curators, and educators who were deepening their engagement with this sort of racial and economic justice work. As a graduate student at NYU during the late Bush II and early Obama eras—when Western media started to proliferate stories about “surgical strikes” and drone warfare (signaling a broader military shift from ground troops and counterinsurgency to drone strikes and counterterrorism in the “War on Terror”), I knew that I wanted to connect my long standing investments in the emancipatory potential of art and creative cultural production to these world-historical and urgent geopolitical questions of war, capitalism, and empire too. Insurgent Aesthetics is really a product of that heady time—deepening my own thinking on the interplay between art-making and freedom-dreaming.
ZH: What are your recent inspirations, and in what direction is your work headed? How has the pandemic affected your work?
RK: Before the pandemic, I started a new project about breath and breathing as a kind of metaphor for the uneven distribution of risk and the otherwise possibility of freedom and flight in the context of climate change and US imperial decline. I’ve been reading and teaching in critical ethnic studies, environmental humanities, and disability studies and wanted to center questions of breath and breathing in our times. Respiration, as something that biopolitical regimes and states have historically tried to control not only through torture regimes on slave plantations and in the colonies and beyond. But breath and respiration have often also been the experimental sites for artists and revolutionaries to imagine more emancipatory futures in aesthetic terms. Then of course the pandemic hit and we all became more conscious about the role that [shared] breathing plays in relation to our differential vulnerabilities to climate chaos and beyond.
Movement Workshop with Hussein Smko during the Veteran Art Summit at the Hyde Park Art Center, 2023.
Photo by Daniel King.
ZH: What hope do you have for the future and how does collective healing play a role in that?
RK: “Hope is a discipline” as the Black feminist abolitionist and educator Mariame Kaba reminds us. I am interested in the idea of collective care against reified and individuated notions of self-care. There is this normative push for “self-care” as if it was something that you should do on weekends or your off time so that you can go right back to the work that you’re doing for capitalism. There have been lots of important critiques of that phenomenon, especially during the pandemic when a lot of people lost their jobs or couldn’t keep up work, or became newly sick or disabled. Currently, what I’m doing is learning from disability justice and transformative justice activists who’ve been thinking about healing and care from a different vantage point that’s much more rooted in community and struggles against colonialism, racism, sexism, and ableism.
Healing justice is about transforming ourselves and our relationships to others and transforming our own embodiment with the recognition of histories of trauma and these legacies of violence. That’s a different vantage point that’s inspiring my new book project. I am researching how queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (QTBIPOC) communities have created new models of transformative/healing justice praxis and radical speculation across transnational sites of militarized security and urban warfare. My book is inspired by the concept of “care work” in race-radical and Indigenous feminisms, Black and Palestinian liberation struggles, and disability justice movements, which have long tracked the differential dispensation of care, healing, and survival in communities grappling with legacies of slavery, genocide, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. In the process, I am exploring what culturally grounded systems of care, support, and wellness within QTBIPOC communities can teach us more broadly about embodied vulnerabilities and the intimacies of racialized and gendered bodies, especially at a time of immense ecological peril and political-economic-cultural transformation in the projected afterlives of US imperialism.
So, in a nutshell, this new book is about tracing how people plan to breathe more life into contemporary freedom struggles amidst the wilds of twenty-first-century imperial decline and ecological chaos. We need new blueprints or designs for living in the dystopian here and now, given all of the horrors that surround us. To breathe collectively is a utopian aspiration in the face of unbridled and overlapping horror and violence that includes climate chaos and ongoing war and fascism. We need artists and revolutionaries and freedom-dreamers. We need their wisdom, insights, and imagination. I think I would personally be eviscerated by all of the horrible things that are happening in the world without this imperative. That’s what compels me to pay attention to minoritarian art and activism, now more than ever.
“We need artists and revolutionaries and freedom-dreamers. We need their wisdom, insights, and imagination. I think I would personally be eviscerated by all of the horrible things that are happening in the world without this imperative.”
Hussein Smko, Hipólito Arriaga III, and GOODW.Y.N., The Space Between performed during the Unlikely Entanglements opening program at the Hyde Park Art Center, 2023.
Photo by Fanny Garcia.
Ronak K. Kapadia is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and affiliated faculty in Art History, Global Asian Studies, and Museum and Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is a co-organizer of Surviving the Long Wars, which explores the multiple overlapping histories that shape our understanding of contemporary warfare, as well as the alternative visions of peace, healing, and justice generated by diverse communities impacted by war. His interdisciplinary research engages critical ethnic studies, transnational queer and feminist studies, visual culture and performance studies, and critical studies of the US empire and the national security state. Kapadia’s first book, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press 2019) was awarded the 2020 Surveillance Studies Network Best Book Prize. Insurgent Aesthetics theorizes the queer world-making power of contemporary art responses to US militarism in the Greater Middle East. It examines the race-radical queer feminist visions, sensations, and freedom dreams of transnational South and Southwest Asian visual art and aesthetics in the context of contemporary US global state violence and its forever wars of security and terror in the Greater Middle East. Kapadia is co-editor of the special issue of Surveillance and Society on race and surveillance (2017) and his writing appears in numerous academic journals, edited volumes, and art catalogs. He is at work on a second book-length project, Breathing in the Brown Queer Commons, which examines queer and trans migrant futurisms in visual culture and performance art to develop a critical theory of healing justice and pleasure in the wilds of ecological chaos and US imperial decline. In 2023, Kapadia was awarded the UIC “Scholar of the Year - Rising Star” Award, and he is a proud recipient of the 2022 UIC Silver Circle Award for Teaching Excellence.
Zaynab Hilal is a first-generation Arab American born and raised in Houston, Texas. She received a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology with double minors in Sociology and India Studies from the University of Houston in 2021. Currently, she is completing her Master of Arts in Museum and Exhibitions Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is also the coordinator of the Surviving the Long Wars scholarly series and catalog publication. Zaynab is committed to social, environmental, and art activism, and plans to support and uplift underrepresented artists as a future curator. In her free time, Zaynab enjoys writing for her blog, Around Art, and visiting the latest exhibitions, along with community volunteering.
