Voices of veteran researchers

The ‘voice of the veteran’ is simultaneously over and under-represented in our society and our scholarship alike (Bulmer and Jackson 2015). Veterans’ voices are both privileged and marginalized, their stories glorified and vilified, their subjectivity either militarized or demilitarized, and their experiences both banal and extraordinary (Kelly 2013; Tidy 2015; Bulmer and Eichler 2017; Wool 2015). The figure of the veteran suffers from an ‘over-determination’ of meaning and an impoverished language to explore it, such that negotiating a veteran identity can become overwhelmingly complicated (Macleish 2013; Caddick Forthcoming). Veterans’ voices are a site of contestation related to their authenticity, and mediated or performative nature (Tidy 2015; Woodward and Jenkings 2011). Within scholarship, military experience either bestows legitimacy upon the author (e.g. traditional war studies, see Antrobus and West 2022), or invites suspicion (e.g. some anti-militarist feminist scholars, see Duncanson 2013)...