While scholars of the Middle East have long been attentive to problems of land and property, resource extraction and accumulation, and the political nature of knowledge production, it is only within the last twenty years or so that many have begun to tackle these and ot..
Camille Cole, Brittany Cook, and Gabi Kirk and the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI)
Camille Cole is a PhD candidate in History at Yale University. Her dissertation, “Empire on Edge: Land, Law, and Capital in Gilded Age Basra,” examines how wealthy elites in late Ottoman Basra used state tools and vocabularies alongside legal and illegal environmental manipulation and novel financial practices to accumulate land. Her work can be found in the Journal of Social History, Middle Eastern Studies, and South Asian History and Culture. Beginning in Fall 2020, she will be a Junior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge.
Gabi Kirk is a PhD Candidate in Geography with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research at the University of California, Davis. Working between political ecology, feminist geography, and geographies of colonialism, her dissertation project examines how Palestinian farmers and sustainable development organizations in the northern West Bank use agro-ecology in projects of identity formation and struggles for sovereignty. She also has a project on the critical history of agricultural science which looks at transnational circuits of agricultural and infrastructural expertise between California and Palestine from the 19th century onward. She has a personal and intellectual interest in interrogating Zionist claims to “Jewish indigeneity” through environmentalism. She has published, solo and collaboratively, both academic and popular pieces, including in Journal of Political Ecology, Society and Space, and PROTOCOLS.