Anthropology Annual Lecture 2025: Waste as Horizon: Infrastructure and Palestine’s Future
The annual lecture is a marquee event for the Department of Anthropology. The yearly address provides faculty, staff and students with a unique opportunity to meet eminent leaders in the field.
How does waste mediate social and political life? Stamatopoulou-Robbins traces Palestinians’ experiences of waste in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Her talk offers an analysis unusual in the study of Palestine: it begins with the environmental, infrastructural, and aesthetic context in which Palestinians forge their lives. She 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 twenty-first century conditions of settler colonialism, and how can an investigation of infrastructure help us understand Gaza, and Palestine more broadly, in the present moment?
Register NowLearn More
