The contested city of Hebron, or Al Khalil, in the Palestinian West Bank is well known for the spatial disintegration it has endured under the Israeli Occupation. The division of the city into Palestinian and Israeli “zones,” and the accompanying Israeli military force that oversees and upholds this artificial territorial arrangement, renders Hebron a critical fieldsite for the study of mobility and spatial politics, even as it generates extreme life challenges for its residents. This paper takes the Ibrahimi Mosque at the heart of the Old City as a microcosm of the spatial, material, and phenomenological quandaries that residents face and analyzes the mosque as a site of two intersecting regimes of mobility. Access to the mosque (both on the approach and inside) is governed by a spatial regime comprised of choke points, checkpoints, walls, tunnels, passageways, and flows. Yet access and use is likewise managed via a temporal regime, perhaps less familiar, but no less impactful. This regime governs and structures mobility in accordance with epochal, seasonal, and daily rhythms as well as temporal dynamics such as synchronicity, sequence, and duration. In this formulation, time itself, alongside more visible and tangible artifacts, becomes a force that underlies mobility and generates particular political orders. Hebron is reconfigured as a space bounded not purely by physical materialities, but rather by a series of relations that include temporal divisions, use-patterns, and alternating sovereignties. This paper is based on fieldwork and interviews conducted in 2015, 2016, and 2018.

This work examines how state and nonstate actors in Morocco understand and negotiate environmental politics through rhetoric and quotidian interactions around garbage. While many forms of environmental politics may seem abstract and distant, trash is tangible and intimate. Interactions with garbage are highly sensory and informed by deeply held notions of order, cleanliness, and disgust. Waste is an inevitable byproduct of all human life, but in our contemporary moment of global capitalism, trash is an increasing source of social, economic, and political anxiety. During the 2015 garbage crisis in Beirut, trash piling up in the streets of the capital served as a catalyst for – up to that point – unprecedented cross-class and cross-sectarian mobilization. While such instances of disruption and chaos can serve as formative moments of societal reckoning and collective action, trash both shapes and is shaped by political action through a host of quotidian interactions. Moments of system breakdown paint only partial pictures of the systems themselves and the slow violence (Nixon 2011) enacted when they are working exactly as intended. This project builds on theoretical traditions that considers the political impact of nonhuman actors/actants (Mitchell 2002; Latour 1996; Bennet 2010), as well as foundational anthropological work (Douglas 1966) and recent ethnographic research (Robbins 2020; Ayuero & Swistun 2009) that considers how trash and toxicity shape political action. This paper draws on preliminary research conducted in Morocco 2019 and analysis of an original corpus of Arabic media, government reports, and material from nongovernmental organizations related to trash management in the country.

This paper turns to the introduction of 5G services to the Rafik Hariri International airport in Beirut, Lebanon, in September of 2019. This came just weeks before the country’s national mobilizations protesting decades of deteriorating socioeconomic conditions and successive corrupt governments. While international headlines focused on the state’s announcement of a “Whatsapp Tax” which directly preceded the mass protests, this project is interested in the airport services for the online commentary that it provoked around national Internet speeds. It turns to a collection of Tweets in which users responded to state-owned telecommunications company, Ogero, announcing faster speeds for travelers. These Tweets articulated points of comparison between the airport speeds and the much slower speeds in homes across Lebanon. By examining these “speed test” screenshots, this paper offers an understanding of infrastructure through the analytics of “differential inclusion” (Mezzadra & Nielson 2013, Puar 2012) and “differential mobility” (Langan 2001). Turning to the points of comparison that users make, between one another and between themselves and the state, points to what is sensed and embodied, but only becomes articulated through the thresholds materialized by the introduction of 5G and other differential practices. In this way, this framework helps to unsettle dominant discourses about political mobilization which begin with essentialized conceptions of sectarianism or functionalist political process models by offering an understanding of the different capacities afforded to particular bodies. Ultimately, it offers that rather than serving as repressive or constraining measures, such policies can also materialize the very grounds from which to mount political refusal.

Examining the crisis that left residents of Gaza with less than six hours of electricity per day during the summer of 2017, this paper suggests that the sewage that flooded the Mediterranean Sea as a result of the power shortages is a discourse in itself. Utilizing rhetorical and cultural criticism of media, infrastructure, and political context surrounding the crisis, I argue that--by circumventing the contested, colonial borders that limit Gazans--sewage becomes a living dead discourse which revives and reconfigures various imaginations of the collective life of Palestine and Israel. Sewage and its attendant infrastructures at once evidence the Israeli state’s near-total management over Palestinian life and death while, at the same time, leaking out of rhetorical bounds in a way that cannot neatly be contained by blaming Palestinians for their suffering in the way that official Israeli communication on the crisis did. Wastewater’s sensory communication invokes the ambiguity of the distinction between life and death, as well as between animate and inanimate, in ways that draw attention to the hierarchies of the human that value certain lives over others.