Dr. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins - Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (2021)

The presentation depicts waste's constant returns. It thus challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet. 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.” The speaker argues that to speak of waste siege is to describe 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 new book project, Homing Austerity: Airbnb in Athens, investigates how Airbnb is transforming the relationship between subjectivity, real estate, and work in Greece as a way of understanding the joint world-making of austerity and platform capitalism. Other publications include pieces in International Journal of Middle East Studies; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space; Jerusalem Quarterly; Anthropology News; New Centennial Review; and the Refugee Studies Centre Working Paper Series at the University of Oxford. Her film, Waste Underground (with videographer Ali al-Deek), premiered at the Sharjah Biennial in Ramallah in 2017. 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. Sponsored by: Israel Institute Teaching Fellow, Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and International Relations & Global Studies

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