Environment in Context: Wetlands and the Moral Ecologies of Infrastructure in Turkey

Huma Gupta and Camille Cole speak with Dr. Caterina Scaramelli about Turkey’s wetland ecosystems. Scaramelli unpacks how many different shallow-water ecosystems are materially and discursively produced into a flattened category called "wetlands."

Camille Cole

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.

Huma Gupta

Huma Gupta is a scholar of environmental planning and the political economy of architecture. Gupta is a postdoctoral fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, where she is working on two book projects: "Dwelling and the Architecture of Dispossession" and "Dwelling and the Wealth of Nations." In 2020, she completed her dissertation "Migrant Sarifa Settlements and State-Building in Iraq" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was a fellow in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture.

Caterina Scaramelli

Caterina Scaramelli is the Research Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Earth and Environment at Boston University. Her research focuses on the Anthropology of Environment, Science and Infrastructure in Turkey. Her research centers on mutual constitutions of ecologies, scientific expertise, and infrastructures as conduits for people’s moral claims about human and non-human livelihoods. Her book How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey is published by Stanford University Press and will be available in March 2021.