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 conditions of settler colonialism, and how can an investigation of infrastructure help us understand Gaza, and Palestine more broadly, in the present moment?
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is a New York-based anthropologist and film-maker with interests in infrastructure, waste, the environment, platform capitalism, the home, 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. She has begun work on a next project on the rise of "demand avoidance" as diagnosis and lived experience for autistic people. She is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bard College and she serves on the editorial teams of Cultural Anthropology and Critical AI. More on her scholarship and film-making can be found here: https://sophiastamatopoulourobbins.com/.
