Last Week on Jadaliyya (December 26-January 1)

Last Week on Jadaliyya (December 26-January 1)

Last Week on Jadaliyya (December 26-January 1)

By : Jadaliyya Co-Editors

[This is a selection of what you might have missed on Jadaliyya last week. It also includes a list of the most-read articles and roundups. Progressively, we will be featuring more content on our "Last Week on Jadaliyya" series.] 
 

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Roundups

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  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat Awarded Laureate of the Amnesty International Chair

      Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat Awarded Laureate of the Amnesty International Chair

      Every year, Ghent University awards the Amnesty International Chair to a person who makes a special contribution in the field of human rights. The laureate gives a public lecture at Ghent University and additional guest lectures for students. This year laureate of the Amnesty International Chair is Noura Erakat, a prominent Palestinian lawyer and activist, whose courageous and relentless work as a human rights academic and attorney has reshaped legal and political discussions on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

    • One Year of Horror: Israel’s Genocide in Gaza and Its Percussive Violence Beyond

      One Year of Horror: Israel’s Genocide in Gaza and Its Percussive Violence Beyond

      It has been one year since 7 October 2023. One full year of watching unfathomable levels of death and destruction of the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza, as well as that of people in surrounding countries. One year of unceasing shock and horror. To paraphrase Palestinian attorney Lara Elborno, every day has been the worst day.

    • Jadaliyya Co-Editors Statement on “Impossible Solidarity”

      Jadaliyya Co-Editors Statement on “Impossible Solidarity”

      As we announced previously, the article titled “Impossible Solidarity” was taken down when it was discovered that proper in-house editorial procedure had not been followed prior to publication. After a full review that included relevant Page Editors as well as Jadaliyya Co-Editors, the article was removed permanently, and the author was notified. The editors fundamentally disagreed with the article’s placing of settler colonial genocide and authoritarian state repression on equal footing, regardless of what the author’s intentions may have been. The article also included several questionable and/or patently incorrect statements. The consequence of the publication of this piece has been temporarily costly to our mission, regardless of whether readers understand the decentralized and volunteer-based nature of how Jadaliyya operates.

Celebrating the Two-Year Anniversary of Jadaliyya’s Environment Page Launch

The Jadaliyya Environment page started with several unconnected conversations which all came together two years ago, during the early months of the pandemic. It’s almost hard to remember at this point, but a lot of us were feeling like we needed something to doand the pandemic had made us all even more acutely aware than normal of our bodies and the lost material sensation of daily life.

We launched on Earth Day 2020 with a bouquet of stories and a mission statement that emphasized the need for critical perspectives which did not treat the environment as an apolitical question. This year, we published seventeen storiesboth written work and podcastsin both English and Arabic, focusing on themes of race and the environment; climate change and disasters; scarcity narratives; the built environment; and environmental knowledge-production.

Following up on last year’s one-year anniversary post, we’ve prepared the following post to share everything we’ve published in the past year. We hope these resources will be useful for researchers; all who are looking to learn more about environmental questions in the region; and those in search of teaching materials that critically engage with these topics.

Thank you to all of our readers, listeners, and viewers for supporting the page over the past two years! You can reach our editorial team at environment@jadaliyya.com with questions or ideas about how to contribute, and we continue to welcome submissions to the page.

We are opening by highlighting a few pieces published this year that generated important new conversations and contributions. 

Spotlight on Selected 2021-22 New Pieces


Alix Chaplain, Strategies of Power and the Emergence of Hybrid Mini-Grids in Lebanon

From our editors: “In this extraordinary piece, Chaplain traces the emergence of collective electrical supply systems in villages in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley. Deeply researched and analytically innovative, this piece explores the tensions between viewing these mini-grids as essential services in the context of the overall breakdown of the Lebanese state, but also as fundamentally political technologies that reflect and intensify structural inequalities.”

 عمر امسيح تسدال، ويسرى عثمان، وماري دعيق، وحنان زهران، وتالا خوري، وفؤاد معدي، وسمير خريشة، وساهر الخوري، ويارا دواني، وإياد طعم الله, مكانيات: طريقة مفتوحة ومتأصلة لدراسة المشهد الطبيعي

From our editors: “This piece outlines the research approach and critical resources of Makaneyyat, a Palestinian research collective that works to strengthen agro-ecological landscapes in Palestine. The authors describe the array of field-based, geospatial, and qualitative methods, such as oral history, that they have drawn on to produce Makaneyyat’s agro-ecological research engine and broader approach to studying and supporting communities of plants and people in Palestine. Their work provides a model and theoretical framework for developing collaborative, community-based research and tools to support farmers and communities in Palestine and the broader region in the face of climate change and Israeli colonialism.”

Bayan Abubakr, The Contradictions of Afro-Arab Solidarity(ies): The Aswan High Dam and the Erasure of the Global Black Experience

From our editors: “This important piece traces a new environmental history of race in Egypt, showing how even as the Aswan Dam became a focal point of global Afro-Arab solidarities, it was predicated materially on Nubian displacement and discursively on the erasure of Black bodies from the “modern” Egyptian nation. In focusing on how multiple axes of power intersected around the Aswan Dam, Abubakr offers a fresh angle on the familiar history of hydraulic infrastructure in Egypt.”

Red, Green, and International: Abolition Geographies and Environmental Movements with Ruth Wilson Gilmore

From our editors: “This episode of the “Environment in Context” podcast is a gripping conversation between the geographer and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, environment page co-editor Huma Gupta, and anthropologist China Sajadian. Gilmore relates her research on carcerality and environment through a global, comparative lens, from the long traditions of emancipation within Black Marxism, to popular struggles against land grabs in Brazil, to the contemporary challenges of giant monopsonies like Amazon. If abolition must be green, Gilmore insists, it must also be anticapitalist and internationalist.”

Full List of Pieces Published in the Last Year


NEWTON: Anny Gaul, Graham Auman Pitts, and Vicki Valosik, eds.,
Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean

Eyad Houssami, Review of Nomad’s Land: Pastoralism and French Environmental Policy in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean World

Jamie Fico, What Happens to Oasis Farming when the Water Runs Out?

Huma Gupta, Environmental Film Review: She Was Not Alone / لم تكن وحيدة 

Cihan Tugal, One World, In Flames, from California to Turkey

Mohamed Abo-Elgheit, Quick Thoughts: Mohamed Abo-Elgheit on Egypt and the Nile River Crisis

Owain Lawson, Crisis and Change: An Interdisciplinary Roundtable on Climate

Arbella Bet-Shlimon, Oil Contingency: Histories of Oil and Climate Change

Elizabeth Holt, Oil Sensoria

Sophia Stamatopolou-Robbins, Climate and Commensuration in Palestine

External events

  • MESA panels: The Environment page organized and sponsored two sessions at the online Middle East Studies Association conference in December 2021: “Spatial and Environmental Histories of Iraq” with Camille Cole, Huma Gupta, Kali Rubaii, Gabriel Young, and Faisal Husain; and “Critical Environmental Perspectives of the MENA” with Jeannie Sowers, Jennifer Derr, Noura Wahby, China Sajadian, Gabi Kirk, and Owain Lawson.

Announcements:


Announcing NYU Hagop-Kevorkian Center 2021-2022 Virtual Series: Elements of Border and Infrastructure

Media Roundups:


Extended Media Roundup (March-April 2021)

Extended Media Roundup (May-June 2021)