Palestine: Ecology, Waste, Siege
Sunday, May 26, 2024
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM EST
With Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins
This knowledge share will be a presentation based on my long-term research and experience living in occupied Palestine. I focus on the decade that immediately followed the end of the second intifada, or uprising (2000-2006), when it appeared that the West Bank was in a moment of stabilization and when national-scale politics appeared to be collapsing. Within that context, I asked, how does waste mediate social and political life? What can waste management in the absence of a state tell us about twenty-first conditions of settler colonialism?
This presentation traces Palestinians’ experiences of waste in the West Bank, and it’s ramifications for understanding all of the lands under Israeli control, including Gaza. I explore what Palestinians’ improvisations for mitigating the effects of what I call a “waste siege” can tell us about Palestinians' approaches to time and collectivity, and how thinking through the category of ecology can help us understand those approaches. My talk offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it begins with the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians forge their lives. It describes a series of conditions: from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of settler colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life.
In particular, it will tell the stories of a) a Palestinian Authority-sponsored sanitary landfill, b) the village of Shuqba, which has become a dumping ground for Israelis as well as Palestinians, and c) the abandonment of unwanted bread out-of-doors. I will close in two acts: First, by explaining why I believe that waste siege not only describes a stateless Palestine; it also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet. And second, by bringing us into the present to consider how waste siege helps us understand Palestine–and in particular Gaza–since October 7th, 2023.