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- PhD, Interdisciplinary Humanities, York University
- MA, Media Studies, Concordia University
- BA (Honors), Cinema Studies, University of Toronto
Over 2018/19, I'm teaching courses and tutorials in Communication Studies, Cultural Studies and Global Studies. Across these different fields and programs, I ask students to consider issues related to war, biopolitics, imperial-liberal violence, capitalism and neoliberalism, and decolonization. Before my time at 51本色, I was a full-time lecturer with a term appointment at the University of Saskatchewan (2010 to 2013). In teaching, I emphasize reciprocity, responsibility, generosity, provocation, and friendship as ways to do good on the idea that learning is an act of freedom.
My academic work continues to focus on military violence, the semiotic production of military affairs, and the 'biopoliticization of contemporary North Atlantic warfare. I interrogate how military doctrine and practice through paradigms like counterinsurgency, contingency and stability operations, and remote warfare mix firepower and biopower to create speculative environmental effects directed at global populations. Working around critical security studies and liberal war studies, I emphasize the increasing indistinction between ways of war, rule, and life, and the boomerang effects of contemporary warfare that erode boundaries between foreign and domestic jurisdictions. I'm also focused on the spatialization and territorialization of military violence in what are relational geographies of war, security, policing, and interdiction.
Additionally, I'm interested in issues of camouflage and military perception, in the production of military doctrine as a semiotic and discursive system, and in critiquing the indiscriminate register of 'lesser evil' forms of military violence in relation to future military operating concepts, and how these concepts obscure and displace war into seemingly non-military spaces.
I'm also developing a wider project around the idea of "sustainable warfare," which examines the logistical, aesthetic, and material production of late modern warfare as waged by the core advanced capitalist states on the North Atlantic basin by considering the invocation of sustainability, ecology, and environmentalism.
- Most Effective Professor, Edwards School of Business (2013)
- Somers Award for Most Approachable Professor, Edwards School of Business (2013)
- Balan, Neil. 2016. War. Keywords For Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle. Oakland: AK Press. 463-468.
- Balan, Neil. 2015. Anthropology Operationalized, or War as Magic Act. Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 32: 326-330.
Fall 2018
- GS 220A Being Human in a Global Age
- GS 231A War, Culture and Conflict
Winter 2019
- CS 413DA Communication and the Built Environment
- KS 400LA Cultural Studies of the Future
- KS 101A Exploring Cultural Studies
Contact Info:
Office location: DAWB 3-127, Dr. Alvin Woods Building
Office hours:
Tuesdays, noon to 3 p.m.
Thursdays, 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
Languages spoken: English, French