During the Cold War, the US constructed an Arabia that needed to be developed and adopted modern architecture’s apolitical expression in its embassy buildings and Trade Fairs to reshape geopolitical borders and export American modernization schemes across the globe. Using archival material, this paper unpacks postwar American representations of the Middle East and American displays of prowess in overseas trade fairs. By coupling these two aspects of representation, this paper illustrates how the US created the need for aid and how it went about to systematically construct the conditions in which the American, rather than Soviet, methods of modernization were adopted. US experts used maps, aerial, and street photographs to constructed an environmental imaginary of the Middle East in which its society, architecture and landscape were undeveloped, backward and primitive. Through these projections, aid programs visually demonstrating that the region met the established criteria of “underdevelopment”, its susceptibility to encroachment of communism, and in need for modernization. This constructed imaginary enabled American experts to draw parallels between the environments they were familiar with and the new ones where aid was to be delivered. In doing so, American experts first, projected what they knew so that they would be able to operate in foreign landscapes, and second, they replaced the existing environmental imaginary. Based on this, US experts relied on the New Deal development arsenal that modernized the American South to modernize the Middle East. Between 1956 and 1964, the US participated in Trade Fairs in Damascus, Casablanca, Cairo, Tripoli, and Tunis which used modern architecture to depict the US’s neutrality and distance itself from the colonial enterprise. With a prefabricated concrete shell pavilion outfitted with a full-scale pharmacy and operating room, a modern bedroom and kitchen, and a farm, US pavilions centered around the domestic and rural spheres. These scenes constructed for US pavilions became a place to showcase American prowess and also a place in which ideologies were confronted head on. Besides embassy buildings, Trade Fairs were the only places in which the American modernization project could be compared to the Soviet model as both were on full display. Through actively constructed the region with maps and photographs and by displayed itself as apolitical and neutral, the US reshaped geographies, landscapes, and the urban fabric.

In the fourteenth century, the Arab traveler, Ibn Battuta embarked upon his famous journey around the world. In the twenty-first century, the global metropolis of Dubai commemorated this journey by opening a mall, dedicated to Ibn Battuta’s adventures. The Ibn Battuta mall is designed as a series of seven courts, each of which is executed in the architectural style of countries visited by the medieval traveler. With a focus on the Islamic world, the mall incorporates the hallmark architectural styles of several pre-modern Islamic dynasties, presenting a spectacular pastiche of classical Islamic civilization, while housing the familiar brands of the contemporary, global economy. Built by a state-owned development company, the mall utilizes the Islamic art canon to present an abridged, sanitized narrative of the “greatest hits of Islamic civilization,” for local and international consumption. This Ibn Battuta mall offers a new mode for experiencing the classical Islamic past. It translates the field of Islamic art history to a wider audience through the splendor of the mall’s decoration and didactic displays in a mission to “edutain” the audience. In doing so, it offers a mass market corollary to the burgeoning museum industry in the Gulf. While it is tempting to dismiss the mall as neo-Orientalist kitsch, this paper argues that the Ibn Battuta mall makes a more nuanced claim regarding Dubai’s identity. By recreating the travels of Ibn Battuta for modern consumption, the mall presents classical Islam not as dogmatic or insular but as a dynamic, global enterprise – just like Dubai itself. In doing so, the project situates Dubai not only as the de facto inheritor of the glories of the Islamic past but as continuing a rich tradition of Islamic globalism, one that is rooted in scientific, cultural, and capitalistic ventures, facilitated by the connectedness of the Dar al-Islam.

This paper will examine the intersections between big infrastructures and nature conservation projects in the age of “green governance.” In other words, I will trace the expert practices through which the “infrastructural” becomes imbued with the “ecological.” In the northeastern corner of Turkey, the Çoruh River, one of the fastest running rivers in the world, has recently been transformed into a hydropower resource with ten large dams built in rapid succession. Huge concrete dam walls, several kilometers long reservoirs, numerous tunnels, and transmission lines have conquered the landscape. Behind this overpowering conquest of nature, however, lie novel practices of environmental governance. In the Çoruh River Watershed, new projects have been designed to relocate and preserve endemic plants endangered by large dams through the collaboration between the scientific community and state officials. Displacement and resettlement due to large dams, which was once only a concern for “local communities,” has now expanded to encompass plant life. By paying a sustained anthropological attention to this project, in this paper, I will shed light on the ways in which discourses of green governance travel across space, unfolding through diverse interests and concerns of and relations among the governmental actors involved. Moreover, building on anthropologist Tania Li’s (2007) inquiry of the “politics as provocation”, I will approach the “greening” of large dams as a governmental attempt to absorb and contain a critical scrutiny: an attempt that is not a fait accompli but one that has its own flaws and limits. I will show that the attempts of containing the environmental critique against dams, in fact, pave the way for the articulation of further conflicts about what counts as “nature” and what constitutes “conservation practices.” Furthermore, my ethnographic gaze will reveal the emerging challenges and disputes about questions of knowledge, expertise, and responsibility among project implementers, as well as the spaces of collaboration emerging from within such “greening” projects.

Public toilets have been around since the earliest human civilizations, dating back to the 4th millennium B.C. in Mesopotamia (Mitchell, p.23, 2015). Throughout much of history, the public toilet was not only a communal, and often gender neutral place to carry out bodily functions, it was also a public space where people socialized and caught up on the news of the day (Antoniou, et al., p.18-19, 2016). Despite the longevity of the public toilet and the universality of its usage, limited research has been undertaken to deconstruct its’ contemporary governmentality. The governmentality of toilet segregation based on a sex binary is not based in biological need, but in social constructs of gender and sexuality that ensure a social hierarchy and maintain the mystery of sexual anatomy, ensuring the dominance of heterosexuality and sex-role differentiation. This research project explores various state projects of governmentality globally, related to the securitization, morality, and hygiene politics of public toilets. I will also argue that despite the evolving governmentality and regulation of public toilets, bathroom stalls provide a public space for discourse to challenge these social constructs of gender and sexuality. An exploratory case study is conducted to determine how the toilet stall can be seen as a site of anonymous public discourse around these social constructs. Writings in women’s bathroom stalls are collected and used as a site of analysis to explore how stall users interact and challenge these social constructs. Samples have been taken from writings in stalls of women’s bathrooms in libraries at the American University of Beirut and at the University of California Los Angeles. More writing samples will be collected from women’s bathroom stalls in university libraries in Lebanon, Egypt, and the United States to offer a comparative and global analysis.