Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine

by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

Waste Siege offers an analysis unusual in the study of it depicts the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians are obliged to forge their lives. To speak of waste siege is to describe a series of conditions, from smelling wastes to negotiating military infrastructures, from biopolitical forms of colonial rule to experiences of governmental abandonment, from obvious targets of resistance to confusion over responsibility for the burdensome objects of daily life. Within this rubble, debris, and infrastructural fallout, West Bank Palestinians create a life under settler colonial rule. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins focuses on waste as an experience of everyday life that is continuous with, but not a result only of, occupation. Tracing Palestinians' own experiences of wastes over the past decade, she considers how multiple authorities governing the West Bank―including municipalities, the Palestinian Authority, international aid organizations, NGOs, and Israel―rule by waste siege, whether intentionally or not. Her work challenges both common formulations of waste as "matter out of place" and as the ontological opposite of the environment, by suggesting instead that waste siege be understood as an ecology of "matter with no place to go." Waste siege thus not only describes a stateless Palestine, but also becomes a metaphor for our besieged planet.

Genres: Nonfiction

344 pages, Hardcover

Published December 10, 2019

About the author

Professor Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an anthropologist whose research centers around infrastructure, discard studies, science and environment, climate change, colonialism and postcoloniality, austerity, the “sharing economy,” property, housing, the Middle East, and Europe. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, forthcoming), explores what happens when, as Palestinians are increasingly forced into proximity with their own wastes and with those of their occupiers, waste is transformed from “matter out of place,” per prevailing anthropological wisdom, into matter with no place to go—or its own ecology. Her new book project investigates how Airbnb is transforming the relationship between subjectivity, real estate, and work in Greece as a way of understanding the world-making of austerity governance. Her other publications include pieces in the American Ethnologist; International Journal of Middle East Studies; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; Arab Studies Journal; Jerusalem Quarterly; Anthropology News; New Centennial Review; and the Refugee Studies Centre Working Paper Series at the University of Oxford. Her film Waste Underground (with videographer Ali al-Deek) premiered at the Sharjah Biennial in Ramallah in 2017. She has presented her work at invited sessions of the American Anthropological Association, Middle East Studies Association, American Ethnological Society, Association of American Geographers, Modern Greek Studies Association, and at several American universities as well as a number of venues in Palestine. Her research has been awarded funding by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Columbia University, and Palestinian American Research Council.

BA, magna cum laude, anthropology and human rights, Columbia University; Msc, forced migration, University of Oxford; PhD, anthropology, Columbia University. At Bard since 2013.

Reviews

[Jane Kinney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don’t think I finished the last few chapters but I guess this counts as the sum of all my anthro readings. Good book tho v interesting stuff

[loyboy · Rating 5 out of 5]

such an interesting topic and a unique way to learn more about how the west bank is governed, especially how little power the PA has. writing could’ve been a little less dull at times but 5 stars is still deserved.