Arts & Culture
UC Santa Cruz Professor Banu Bargu Awarded 2025 David Easton Prize for ‘Disembodiment’
UC Santa Cruz History of Consciousness Professor Banu Bargu, an acclaimed scholar of political theory and resistance, has spent her career exploring some of the most extreme and harrowing forms of political protest, including hunger strikes. Bargu’s work has now been recognized with the 2025 David Easton Prize from the American Political Science Association.
Banu Bargu
UC Santa Cruz Professor Banu Bargu Awarded 2025 David Easton Prize for Disembodiment
UC Santa Cruz History of Consciousness Professor Banu Bargu, an acclaimed scholar of political theory and resistance, has spent her career exploring some of the most extreme and harrowing forms of political protest, including hunger strikes.
She views these forms of dangerous protest as tools of communication and resistance—public demonstrations of defiance that utilize the vulnerability of the human body as a political force.
Bargu’s work has now been recognized with the 2025 David Easton Prize from the American Political Science Association.
The award honors her latest book, Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal, for its interdisciplinary engagement with philosophical and political questions surrounding resistance and the politics of the body.
In a recent interview, Bargu, reflecting on her research, emphasized that her role as a scholar is analytical, not prescriptive, when it comes to the desperate acts that she chronicles:
“I purposefully abstain from making specific recommendations about the best ways to govern or the best ways to resist,” Bargu said. “I don’t think it is the scholars’ place to tell political actors how to act, but, rather, to study and analyze those actions as a way to understand the contradictions of our present.”
In her writing, Bargu has described “political disembodiment” as the public performance of self-harm, self-destruction, and self-endangerment.
“A hunger striker looks so frail and yet commands a political force that is the inverse of that frailty, a force that stems not only from the demand of justice it performs but also from the very form of that performance,” she wrote, noting that mass acts of self-starvation, especially under detention, can constitute a form of asymmetric struggle against the state.
Bargu’s analysis situates these actions as symptoms of profound structural violence—forms of resistance that arise when all other avenues are foreclosed.
At the same time, Bargu links her inquiry to a deeper ethical concern:
Though she writes analytically about hunger strikes and self immolations, “that doesn’t mean that my work disavows normative and political commitments to a social and political order that puts human dignity at its center,” Bargu said. “The denial of that dignity and the subjection of human beings to destitution and violence, whether in carceral sites or in everyday life, lead them to express their anguish in extreme forms.”
As Bargu herself notes, preventing such “extreme forms of refusal” requires attention to the material and political conditions that produce them:
“If our goal is to prevent such extreme forms of refusal from happening, we need to attend to the material conditions, policies, and practices that create situations marked by extreme human suffering.”
Disembodiment traverses history and geography to share examples of people driven to extreme forms of resistance, from the suicides of enslaved Africans during the transatlantic crossing, to the hunger strikes of suffragists in England, to anticolonial fasts in India, the hunger and thirst strikes in Guantánamo and Northern Ireland’s “HM Prison Maze,” and the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi, whose death sparked the Arab Spring.
Bargu has also studied contemporary acts such as lip-sewing by migrants and asylum seekers in detention centers across Europe, Australia, and Mexico.
In each case, she treats these acts as stark reflections of the conditions that drive human beings to sacrifice their own bodies in pursuit of recognition and dignity.