Book Projects
This Information May Kill You
I am at work on a trade nonfiction book titled This Information May Kill You. This book is about psychological warfare and the politics of reality in the twenty-first century.
Image: PAPER SHOWER: Psychological Warfare leaflets flutter from a leaflet chute newly installed through the floor of a 14th Air Commando Wing C-47 Skytrain
George H. Kelling Collection, Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University,
Transforming Science: Theory and Practice is an accessible handbook aimed at scientists, researchers, and students interested in research for transformative social change. Readers learn to design and implement a research project that forwards scientific and social justice ends. Through conceptual tools, examples, and exercises that illustrate community-based research gone wrong and right, the book covers how scientific processes have been misused, how to develop non-hierarchical and long-term relations and practices, and how researchers can repair relations with communities and environments.
Transforming Science is a guide for practicing the science we are for: science for and with the people.
Forthcoming 2026
Decolonizing Bodies: Stories of Embodied Resistance, Healing and Liberation
“Decolonizing Bodies reveals both resilience and vulnerabilities of the sensuous bodies as the foundation of meaning, experience, and transformation. The rich collection of personal, scholarly, and artistic stories invites the readers to engage their own bodily awareness to sense and feel with the authors. The book is a call for reimagining the way we embody our communities and relationships through decolonial healing.”
Sachi Sekimoto, Minnesota State University, Mankato, USA
“Ureña & Varma’s generative, wide-ranging, multi-genre collection puts flesh and blood on decolonizing as a mode of being-perceiving-theorizing that reorients our attunement to self and world and conclusively transforms our creative and scholarly practice. Whether analyzing urban gardens in Kashmir and Colombia, reading racist US archives or mapping a process-driven exploration for a film in progress, each contribution enacts a vital aspect of the reclamation and reinterpretation integral to decolonizing knowledge.”
Lata Mani, author of Myriad Intimacies and director of The Poetics of Fragility
Winner of the Edie Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing
REVIEWS
"Saiba Varma offers us a beautifully crafted ethnography, providing political insight without objectifying the recipients of care as victims or sufferers" - Kaushik Sunder Rajan, University of Chicago
“The Occupied Clinic is a chilling, thought provoking, and beautifully written work... Saiba Varma's astute and incisive portrayal of life, survival, and care in conditions of occupation is original and valuable.” - Sarah Pinto, author of The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis
"The book is a deeply moving work from a committed medical anthropologist. It will be of great help to anyone who wants to understand the cost of living in a highly and densely militarized zone of the world." - Khalid Bashir Gura, Kashmir Life
"A book crafted with professional care. . . s She labours to translate the meanings of dense words they invoke and theorises on some of them at length. At times I liked the train of her thought so much that I wished for more." - Gowhar Fazili, The Wire
"Clinicians, undergraduate students, and anyone curious about the fraught translation between biomedical psychiatry and local contexts of suffering will greatly appreciate Varma's dexterous and generous ethnography. Varma’s beautiful writing, interspersed with vibrant images and artwork and haunting poetry, will be greatly appreciated"
- David Ansari, Anthropology and Humanism
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