Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies and the Middle East Studies Program.
This talk draws on long term fieldwork for two book projects, one based in Palestine and the other based in Greece, to make the case for thinking about the strategies people use to mitigate besieging circumstances through questions about infrastructure. The talk begins with stories of “waste siege” in the occupied West Bank to show how waste and its infrastructures become braided into people’s senses of ethics, self, and possibilities for alternative futures. It then crosses the Mediterranean, following Israeli and Palestinian investors in Athens apartments into stories of Greek homes that have been turned into Airbnb listings as a mode of maintaining partial attachments under prolonged austerity, a process Stamatopoulou-Robbins calls “controlled alienation.” Together these two projects offer answers to two main questions that animate the author’s work. How do destructive conditions—be they ecological, political, or economic—remake socialities and relations? And how do people harness the material and semiotic properties of infrastructures to make their everyday lives workable—that is, livable—under conditions of duress?
Professor Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an anthropologist with research interests in infrastructure, waste, environment, platform capitalism, and the home. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), has won five major book awards and 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 current book, Controlled Alienation: Airbnb and the Future of Home (under contract with Duke University Press), explores the joint world-making of austerity and home-sharing in Greece.