Status/الوضع

On this episode of Environment in Context, Huma Gupta and Danya al-Saleh speak to Nadia Christidi, a PhD candidate in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and an arts practitioner. Her dissertation research explores how cities that face water supply challenges, which are expected to intensify with climate change, are imagining, planning, and preparing for the future of water; the cities she focuses on are Los Angeles, Dubai, and Cape Town.

How do we imagine, think about, and represent environmental crises around water and climate change? Water management and climate change have previously been considered the exclusive purview of environmental scientists, engineers, economists, security analysts, or policymakers. However, Nadia Christidi explains how an anthropological approach can help us understand the political practices and economic rationalities of water governance based on her fieldwork in Dubai. Specifically, we discuss how these ecological imaginaries around water are conditioned by social and political forces, ranging from considering water to be an infinite resource, a commodity that is produced, or an extreme landscape that serves as a testbed for technological innovation.

References
1. Nadia Christidi's Website: Nadiaalissa.wordpress.com
2. Gökçe Günel. “The Infinity of Water: Climate Change Adaptation in the Arabian Peninsula.” Public Culture 28.2 (May 2016): 291-315.
3. Michael Christopher Low. “Desert Dreams of Drinking the Sea, Consumed by the Cold War: Transnational Flows of Desalination and Energy from the Pacific to the Persian Gulf.” Environment and History 26.2 (May 2020): 145-174.
4. Toby Craig Jones. Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
5. Candis Callison. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

الخضر شودار ولد بالجزائر و يعيش في شيكاغو. درس بجامعة تلمسان ثم وهران و تخرج من جامعة فلوريدا في الآداب الفرانكومغاربية، و عمل أستاذا في جامعة فلوريدا و ميشيغان. يعمل الآن محاضراً في جامعة شيكاغو.

يصدر له قريباً:
(الجهة الأخرى من الأشياء (ديوان شعر)

ملمسك ناعم كموت شجرة، مختارات للشاعر الفرنسي آلان بوسكيه مترجمة عن الفرنسية.

In this interview, the Algerian poet Elkhidr Choudar talks about his beginnings as a poet, his vision of poetry and the Arab poet in the context of his/her tradition and the wider international context and influences.

He also talks about the influence of continuous travel in his poetic experience and the doors and windows that translation of poetry into Arabic opens.

Interviewed by Osama Esber
August 25th, 2020 | Arabic

In the second episode of “1979 Generation,” Jadaliyya’s Iran Page co-editor, Manijeh Nasrabadi interviews Shahla Talebi on the liberation of political prisoners, the intersection of gender, class and revolution, and the emergence of “proletarian feminism.”

Shahla Talebi is Associate Professor of Religious Studies in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Shahla was a student activist who participated in the 1979 Revolution, lived through the Iran-Iraq war, and left Iran for the U.S. in 1994. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, "Ghosts of Revolution: Rekindled Memories of Imprisonment in Iran", published by Stanford University Press in 2011.

(Photo by Hengameh Golestan)

On Tuesday, August 4th, a massive explosion rocked Beirut and sent a giant mushroom cloud into the sky. The blast, which struck the city with a force comparable to a 3.5 magnitude earthquake, destroyed much of the country’s main port, flattened and damaged hundreds of buildings, including three hospitals, and a huge number of businesses and homes. So far, 135 fatalities have been counted, 300,000 have been displaced and over 5000 have been injured. Hundreds of people are still trying to know the whereabouts of their loved ones who went missing.

To get a better picture of what happened in Beirut and the economic and political crisis compounded by the covid-19 pandemic that is pushing the country to the brink of economic collapse, Shahram Aghamir spoke with Ziad Abu Rish the Co-Director of the MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts, and Visiting Associate Professor of Human Rights, at Bard College. Ziad is a 2020–21 Research Fellow in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. His research explores state formation, economic development, and popular mobilizations in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Lebanon and Jordan. He serves as Co-Editor of Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya. He is also a Research Fellow at the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS).

Photo by Hiba Al Kallas

Lebanese/American filmmaker Jude Chehab describes her experiences of the August 4th explosion in Beirut, recent protests in the city, and how these events lead her and others to organize grassroots rebuilding and transparent relief efforts in the Lebanese capital.

Donate now via PayPal to help support those impacted by the explosion in Beirut. paypal.me/judechehab

Interviewed by Paola C. Messina
August 9th, 2020 | English

In his brand-new book, "Genocide in Libya: Shar, a Hidden Colonial History" due out in two weeks, University of New England Professor Ali Ahmida meticulously documents the tragic story of a systematic genocide of the Libyan people by Italian colonial authorities a century ago, as well as the methodical cover up that ensued.

Despite a dearth of recorded materials, most of which were classified or destroyed, through painstaking interviews with genocide survivors and their descendants, Professor Ahmida manages to accomplish a seemingly impossible task by reconstructing bit by bit a shameful episode from the brief but devastating history of Italian colonialism in north Africa, thanks to the enduring memory and steadfastness of the martyred people of Libya.

Courtesy of Voices of the Middle East and North Africa (VOMENA).

Renewable, clean sources such as solar and wind energy have become an important part combatting the climate crisis and its impacts, but can we divorce the environmentally friendly technologies from the conditions under which these are developed and implemented? And what happens when renewable energy development becomes synonymous with colonial expansion and political repression?

Israel’s feverish plans to build the largest onshore wind farm in the occupied Golan Heights are a good example of why the conversation about a decarbonized economy may not be abstracted from considering prevailing power structures and systems of oppression including colonialism.

Malihe Razazan spoke with Muna Dajani and Wael Tarabieh, an activist and co-founder of Al-Marsad | The Arab Centre for Human Rights in the Golan Heights, which is an independent, not-for-profit international human rights organization located in Majdal Shams, in the Occupied Syrian Golan. The center was founded in October 2003 by a group of lawyers and professionals in the fields of law, health, education, journalism and engineering, along with human rights defenders and other interested community members.

Muna Dajani holds a PhD from the Department of Geography and Environment at LSE. Her PhD research aimed to examine the distinctive livelihood practices by which water use and farming acquire political subjectivity in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and Al Battuf Valley in the Galilee. She is now the Research Officer in a collaboration project between Birzeit University and LSE entitled ‘Mapping Memories of Resistance: the untold story of the occupation of the Golan Heights’

Wael Tarabieh, the co-founder of al-Marsad, The Arab Centre for Human Rights in the Golan Heights is an independent, not-for-profit international human rights organisation located in Majdal Shams, in the Occupied Syrian Golan. The centre was founded in October 2003 by a group of lawyers and professionals in the fields of law, health, education, journalism and engineering, along with human rights defenders and other interested community members.

In recent decades, the six members of the GCC, which includes the Gulf Arab monarchies of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain, have lured millions of mostly low skilled and semi-skilled workers from South and Southeast Asia and Africa. For the past few months, the migrant workers in these monarchies have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impact.

To understand the plight of these millions of migrant workers and the history of labor migration in this region, Shahram Aghamir spoke to Assistant Professor Andrea Wright, who is in the Department of Anthropology and the Program in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at William & Mary.

Courtesy of Voices of the Middle East and North Africa (VOMENA).

Co-editors of Jadaliyya's Environment Page, Huma Gupta and Gabi Kirk, discussed with Kali Rubaii how ecologies of war have produced multiple waves of displacement and have intimately shaped the lives of displaced Iraqis through the materiality of cement.

ناقش هوما جوبتا وغابي كيرك ، المحررين المشاركان لصفحة البيئة في جدلية ، مع كالي روباي كيف أنتجت بيئات الحرب موجات متعددة من النزوح وشكلت بشكل وثيق حياة النازحين العراقيين من خلال مادة الأسمنت.

The Environment in Context podcast discusses the role of Islamic Financing in the development of the global Green Bond industry. In June 2017, Malaysia was the first country in the world to issue a green sukuk in order to finance a solar power plant. Sukuk are asset-backed financial certificates that were developed over a millenia ago, which are compliant with the Islamic principle of Shari’ah.

http://www.statushour.com/en/Interview/3485

Guest: Aneil Tripathy
Interviewed by Huma Gupta and Bassam Haddad