- Thursday March 4, 2021
- 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Dr. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins joins us to talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict in terms of waste and the environment. Based on the book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine, this presentation offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it begins with the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians forge their lives, naming that context a “waste siege.” Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.
"Waste siege" describes a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. She will focus on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' experiences of wastes over the past decade, and their improvisations for mitigating the effects of this siege, and consider how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, and Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not.
Dr. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bard College. Her research centers around infrastructure, discard studies, environment, colonialism, austerity, platform capitalism, the Middle East, and Europe. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award. It explores what happens when, as Palestinians are increasingly forced into proximity with their own wastes and with those of their occupiers, waste is transformed from “matter out of place,” per prevailing anthropological wisdom, into matter with no place to go—or its own ecology. Her research has been awarded funding by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Columbia University, and Palestinian American Research Council.
"Waste siege" describes a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. She will focus on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' experiences of wastes over the past decade, and their improvisations for mitigating the effects of this siege, and consider how multiple authorities governing the West Bank—including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, and Israel—rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not.
Dr. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bard College. Her research centers around infrastructure, discard studies, environment, colonialism, austerity, platform capitalism, the Middle East, and Europe. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), won the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award. It explores what happens when, as Palestinians are increasingly forced into proximity with their own wastes and with those of their occupiers, waste is transformed from “matter out of place,” per prevailing anthropological wisdom, into matter with no place to go—or its own ecology. Her research has been awarded funding by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Columbia University, and Palestinian American Research Council.
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