In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liutalks with Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins and Jess Ghannam, who comment on a devastating new report authored by Stamatopoulou-Robbins. This report, “Costs of War,” reviews data gathered in Palestine since October 7, 2023. In that year alone, the report finds that the US has spent at least $22.76 billion on military aid to Israel and related US operations in the region. The number of direct deaths, but also so-called “indirect deaths” (and such a term forces us to project such deaths well into the future due to Israel’s massive destruction of the infrastructure and environment necessary to sustain even the barest forms of life), leads this report to claim that “the scale and rapidity of Gaza’s destruction … is unprecedented, not only in Palestinian history, but in recent global history.”  Today we review but a small portion of the information that supports this terrible claim.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an anthropologist and film-maker with research interests  in infrastructure, waste, the environment, platform capitalism, the home, food, disability, and neurodivergence. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), 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 second book, which explores the impacts of Airbnb on property ownership in Athens, Greece, is under contract with Duke University Press. And she is currently beginning work on a next project on the rise of "demand avoidance" as diagnosis and lived experience for autistic people. She serves on the editorial teams of Cultural Anthropology and Critical AI.

Dr. Jess Ghannam is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine at UCSF. His research areas include evaluating the long-term health consequences of war on displaced communities and the psychological and psychiatric effects of armed conflict on children. Dr. Ghannam has developed community health clinics in the Middle East that focus on developing community-based treatment programs for families in crisis.

He is also a consultant with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Reprieve and other international NGO's that work with torture survivors. Locally he works to promote and enhance the health and wellness of refugee, displaced, and immigrant populations from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia and has established a community-based Mental Health Treatment Programs to support these communities.

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