Title: Surreal Stories: Sociotechnical Networks of Violence(s)
PhD Supervisor and Co-Supervisor: Anna Leander and Jonathan Luke Austin
Asees Puri is a Doctoral Candidate at the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. She focuses on the interplay between violence-visuality, social-media, world-building, aesthetics, semiotics and story-telling. Her dissertation tells the story of Palmyra, Syria and the worlds of political violence it has hosted in/through the on-going conflict by borrowing insights from Science and Technology Studies scholars and travelling through social-media microsociological-ly, focusing on the surreal experience of political violence enactments at the corporeal, experiential and local level.