Danya Al-Saleh is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a feminist economic geographer who works on the everyday politics of US universities in the Middle East and North Africa. Her research examines the relationship between US universities, engineering education, and the oil and gas industry in the Gulf, specifically in Qatar. Engaging debates in feminist political economy, critical university studies, and energy geographies, this project examines the role of US universities in reproducing socio-political formations that require the accelerated extraction of fossil fuels. She is also collaborating on a project which traces the nearly century-long role that the American University in Cairo (AUC) has played in Cairo’s uneven urbanization through knowledge production about desert development and the acquisition of suburban desert land.
Mohammed Rafi Arefin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. His research and teaching combines insights from infrastructure studies, urban political ecology, and discard studies to explore the politics of urban waste and sanitation. His recent publications include “Infrastructural Discontent in the Sanitary City: Waste, Revolt, and Repression in Cairo” which was published in Antipode in 2019 and “The State, Sewers, and Security” which was published in the Annals of the AAG also in 2019.
