Authors

The Environment Page is co-edited by Danya Al-Saleh, Camille Cole, Brittany Cook, Huma Gupta, Gabi Kirk, Carly Krakow, and Owain Lawson.

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 dissertation 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. 

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.

Brittany Cook is an Assistant Professor in Geography at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In 2018, she received her PhD in Geography with a graduate certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include organic agriculture and standardization, critical development studies, political ecology, feminist geopolitics, feminist methodologies, and the international political economy of rural development projects. She has worked in the field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and community mapping in the US and Palestine and conducted qualitative research in Cyprus, Palestine, and Jordan. Her work can be found in Annals of the American Association of Geographers (forthcoming), Journal of Rural Studies, Geoforum, and Space and Polity.

Huma Gupta is a scholar of environmental planning and the political economy of development. She is currently a Humanities Research Fellow at New York University - Abu Dhabi. Her book project, The Architecture of Dispossession: Migrant Sarifa Settlements and State-Building in Iraq, examines state-building through the architectural production of rural migrants in cities. She did her doctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was a fellow in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and the Social Science Research Council. Her work has appeared in a number of scholarly venues including the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Thresholds, Aggregate Architectural History Collective (forthcoming), Jadaliyya, and The Ottoman History Podcast. As a practitioner, she has worked on post-war reconstruction in Afghanistan, municipal administration in Syria, grassroots political mobilization in the U.S., and humanitarian response and housing policies for refugees and internally displaced persons around the world.

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.

Carly A. Krakow is a writer, researcher, and activist, and currently a PhD Candidate in International Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her writing has appeared in publications including Al Jazeera, openDemocracy, Truthout, and the academic journal Water. Carly’s research focuses on environmental injustice and human rights in contexts of statelessness and displacement. Over several periods of fieldwork in the West Bank, she has investigated the law and politics of water access and exposure to environmental toxins. Her research has also included fieldwork in South Africa, analyzing the impacts of Cape Town’s water crisis on the city’s most marginalized communities, and in Greece, examining living conditions and access to healthcare for refugees and displaced people. She earned her MPhil in International Relations and Politics from the University of Cambridge and her BA in Human Rights Law, Environmental Policy, and Comparative Literature from NYU.

Owain Lawson is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Oberlin College. He serves as Co-Editor of Arab Studies Journal and Co-Editor of Jadaliyya's environment page. His research explores the history of environment, development, and social movements in the twentieth-century Middle East.