Join us for a talk that reimagines the concept of disappearance not as a failure of the liberal state, but as a fundamental condition that sustains it. From armed conflict and natural disasters undocumented migration and intimate partner violence, this talk traces the interconnected “scenes of disappearance” to argue that absence which produces the state and market is a mode of existence within liberal modernity.

This talk invites us to consider how movements resisting disappearance and other forms of structural violence may open up new possibilities for broad-based solidarity with movements resisting state violence, structural neglect, and systemic erasure.

Themal Ellawala is an activist and doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His work interrogates the long arc of liberalism in Sri Lanka through the lenses of queerness and transness Event flyer Registration link