2025 Anthropology Annual Lecture – Waste as Horizon:  Infrastructure and Palestine’s Future

The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce the 2025 Anthropology Annual Lecture with distinguished lecturer and anthropologist, Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbin. Join us on Thursday, March 20, as Stamatopoulou-Robbins traces Palestinians’ experiences of waste in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.  

This lecture will offer an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine, beginning with the environmental, infrastructural and aesthetic context in which Palestinians forge their lives. Stamatopoulou-Robbins describes how what she calls a “waste siege” was part of a moment of stabilization under occupation in the post-Oslo period, contributing to a sense of indeterminacy around responsibility for the burdensome objects and arrangements of daily life. She asks, “What can waste management, in the absence of a state, tell us about 21st century conditions of settler colonialism, and how can an investigation of infrastructure help us understand Gaza, and Palestine more broadly, in the present moment? The York community is invited to attend.  

Register here.