UTM anthropologist looks beyond the frontlines to uncover war’s hidden scars
When Zoë Wool started interviewing injured soldiers at a military hospital in the U.S. in 2007, she thought the research would be one part of her doctoral thesis about the “war on terror” after the attacks of 9/11. Very quickly, though, she realized that the conversations offered an expanded perspective on the harms of war and their often-unseen, yet wide-ranging, effects.
“A few weeks into my time at the medical centre, I wrote in my field notebook, ‘Forget the war on terror,’” says Wool, an associate professor of anthropology at U of T Mississauga. “It was clear to me that the violence of war was right there in the hospital room, and that’s what I should research and write about. It wasn’t something that had been left overseas but was continuing to unfold in soldiers’ bodies and in their family members’ experiences. Looking at their everyday lives, as anthropology does, was a way of disrupting the usual political narratives about where, when and how the violence of war takes place.”
Today, Wool’s research continues to challenge conventional ideas about war, with a focus on the toxicity of war in the post-9/11 era. She uses the idea of toxicity broadly to understand the way war (and the industrial processes of war-making) produce harms beyond war’s immediate violence to affect the health, identity and livelihood of soldiers and non-combatants, both on and off the battlefield. “My work is about trying to understand war as a thing that has no edges,” says Wool, adding that she first came upon the idea of “edgelessness” in University of Virginia professor Tiffany Lethabo King’s scholarship on slavery and Indigenous genocide. “Even though there is specificity to a war, its impacts aren’t confined to a time and place.”
Looking back to her early years, Wool says an intolerance for injustice helped put her on a path to her current research. While she grew up on New York’s affluent Upper West Side, her parents passed along a sense that she could effect change. “I inherited an awareness of hypocrisy, and a sense that I could and should address it,” she says. In the 1960s, her father supported Latin American artists who were experiencing political repression, and her mother was involved in counterculture movements such as the hippies and anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian, anti-war Yippies. “They gave me the sense that it was possible to meaningfully intervene in the world around me in creative ways.”
But, she says, her biggest lessons came outside the classroom during her undergraduate degree at York University, where she became involved in activist movements against labour inequality, globalization and, most significantly, the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Until then, I’d thought of myself as a New Yorker, not an American,” says Wool, who joined UTM in 2020 from Rice University. “But in 2001, I felt I couldn’t run away from being an American. I had to question the violence that was being done in my name.”
Recalling the massive anti-war demonstrations leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Wool says she felt certain that the voices of millions on the streets couldn’t be ignored. “But we were heard, and it didn’t matter. It was a pivotal moment for me in terms of whether I was going to take a more activist route or become an academic,” she says. “In some ways, I entered academia as a disillusioned war activist.”
Disillusioned, but not deterred, she saw an opportunity to continue her opposition to America’s contemporary wars from a more analytical stance. The 12 months of field work Wool did with injured soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. and other nearby sites formed the basis of her award-winning book After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed (2015). In it, she contrasts the longstanding public image of the wounded soldier as an icon of masculinity, heroism and patriotism – often used for political purposes – with the soldiers’ persistent pain and arduous rehabilitation, a reality that didn’t live up to the symbolism.
Wool arrived at the medical centre thinking that her research would concentrate on how the official messaging around the war on terror compared with the firsthand experience of soldiers and other key players in the war. Through ethnography – an anthropological method where researchers immerse themselves in a setting and use interviews and observation to learn about the social and cultural life of a community – she realized the topic wasn’t something that the soldiers cared about and was far less interesting to her than probing the war’s human aftermath.
“Ethnographic practice is sometimes described as ‘deep hanging out,’” says Wool, who spent countless hours in the centre’s informal spaces and rehab clinics. The urgent conversations she heard and participated in focused on injury, disability and if the veterans were ever going to get back to “normal.”
While she was at Walter Reed, Wool learned about the illnesses caused by soldiers’ exposure to waste-burning pits that the American military uses at operating bases in the absence of any waste management facilities. “Everything goes in, from meal trays to vehicles to human waste, then it’s doused in jet fuel and burns for years, releasing toxins into the air and water,” she says.
Her research on these burn pits, soon to be a book, is one of several projects at UTM’s Toxicity, Waste and Infrastructure Group (TWIG) Research Kitchen. Launched by Wool in 2021, TWIG is a virtual research space that brings together feminist investigators from across the social sciences and humanities to study the historical and contemporary impacts of toxic chemicals. “I called it a kitchen in part because kitchen tables have often been places for organizing resistance,” she says.
Resisting the prevailing stories about burn pits coming out of the American media has meant going beyond the narrow focus on the pits’ effects on U.S. soldiers to examine the largely ignored consequences for the Iraqi and Afghan people and land nearby. Considering this local environmental destruction is part of Wool’s larger rethinking (informed by the work of colleague Kali Rubaii) of the harms of war.
Most recently, she’s opened up her exploration of burn pits to investigate a huge component of the waste that goes into them – plastic water bottles.
“All the water that U.S. service members drink is bottled,” says Wool. “So, the U.S. bottled water industry and the consumer habits that drive this industry are connected to burn pits’ harms.” Again, she’s highlighting the expansiveness of war violence, in this case analyzing factors that are far removed from the frontlines.
Widening the usual view of war’s toxicity, particularly when it comes to the legacies of American military violence, is an essential first step toward individual responsibility and hope, Wool says. For her, this means carefully considering how her voting choices and what she buys (and from what companies) could affect future or current wars.
“Two things are true,” Wool says. “We’re implicated in these structures of violence, and we can find ways from those positions to make more livable worlds.”
This story first appeared in the Autumn 2024 edition of the University of Toronto Magazine
