- The University of Sheffield, Geography, Graduate StudentSultan Qaboos University, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, Department Member, and 6 moreadd
- Israel/Palestine, Water, Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, Cultural Geography, and 45 moreMiddle East Politics, Ecocriticism, Palestinian Literature, Zionism, Space and Place, Political Ecology, Arabic Literature, Israeli Literature, Environmentalism, Colonialism and Imperialism, Cultural Landscapes, Political Geography, Hydropolitics, Water Politics, Water Conflicts, Water History, Natural Resources, Infrastructure, Environmental History, Nature Writing, Israel Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Postcolonial Literature, Post-Colonialism, Environmental Justice, Comparative Literature, Queer Theory, World Literatures, Palestine, Critical Geography, Blue Humanities, Contemporary Literature, Nationalism, Critical Animal Studies, Canadian Literature, Indigenous Literature, Poetry, Poetics, Ecopoetics, Canadian Studies, Queer Ecology, Contemporary Poetry, and Experimental Poetryedit
- I am Chancellor's Fellow at University of Edinburgh, where I am writing a book called Water Crisis and World Literatu... moreI am Chancellor's Fellow at University of Edinburgh, where I am writing a book called Water Crisis and World Literature.
I co-convene the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network, and am an affiliate of Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) and the Edinburgh Futures Institute. I am also Associate Editor of the journal Environmental Humanities.
I was previously Lecturer/Assistant Professor (Ad Astra Fellow) at University College Dublin, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at University of Warwick, Teaching Fellow in Contemporary and Postcolonial Literature at University of Birmingham, and Humanities Research Centre Postdoctoral Fellow at University of York, where I also taught. In 2022, I was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellow at Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, where I conducted research on histories of water infrastructure and water contamination in Japan.
My research has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, University of York Humanities Research Centre, and competitive internal schemes at UCD and University of York. My doctoral research was fully funded by the White Rose Universities Consortium, and co-supervised between English at University of York and Geography at University of Sheffield.
My first monograph, Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature, was published in 2020 by Edinburgh University Press. It was shortlisted for the ASLE-UKI Prize for Best Monograph in Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities.
My interests lie at the intersection of cultural geography and literary studies. I have additional interests in resource politics more broadly, queer ecology, animal studies, and environmental popular culture. You can read or listen to me talk more about my research on the Interviews tab.
From 2013-2015 I coordinated the interdisciplinary, AHRC-funded research network 'Imagining Jerusalem, c. 1099 to the Present Day'. You can read more about the network on our blog: http://jerusalems.wordpress.com/. I have organised many academic and public events on Environmental Humanities, and on the history, culture and politics of Palestine/Israel.
Please contact me if you want to read any of my work and don't have institutional access.edit
Published by Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Paperback 2022. Introduction available on EUP website. Water is a major global issue that will shape our future. Rarely, however, has water been the subject of literary critical attention.... more
Published by Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Paperback 2022. Introduction available on EUP website.
Water is a major global issue that will shape our future. Rarely, however, has water been the subject of literary critical attention. This book identifies water as a crucial new topic of literary and cultural analysis at a critical moment for the world’s water resources, focusing on the urgent context of Israel/Palestine. It argues for the necessity of recognising water’s vital importance in understanding contemporary Israeli and Palestinian literature, showing that water is as culturally significant as that much more obvious object of nationalist attention, the land. In doing so, it offers new insights into Israeli and Palestinian literature and politics, and into the role of culture in an age of environmental crisis. Hydrofictions shows that how we imagine water is inseparable from how we manage it. This book is urgent and necessary reading for students and scholars in Middle East Studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, the environmental humanities and anyone invested in the future of the world’s water.
- Contributes to debates within literary studies on the environmental humanities, national literatures and ‘cli-fi’
- Brings together approaches from literary studies, cultural geography and world politics
- Adds a new ecocritical dimension to scholarship on Israeli and Palestinian literatures
- Covers a broad range of contemporary Israeli and Palestinian authors including Mourid Barghouti, Sayed Kashua and Amos Oz
Water is a major global issue that will shape our future. Rarely, however, has water been the subject of literary critical attention. This book identifies water as a crucial new topic of literary and cultural analysis at a critical moment for the world’s water resources, focusing on the urgent context of Israel/Palestine. It argues for the necessity of recognising water’s vital importance in understanding contemporary Israeli and Palestinian literature, showing that water is as culturally significant as that much more obvious object of nationalist attention, the land. In doing so, it offers new insights into Israeli and Palestinian literature and politics, and into the role of culture in an age of environmental crisis. Hydrofictions shows that how we imagine water is inseparable from how we manage it. This book is urgent and necessary reading for students and scholars in Middle East Studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, the environmental humanities and anyone invested in the future of the world’s water.
- Contributes to debates within literary studies on the environmental humanities, national literatures and ‘cli-fi’
- Brings together approaches from literary studies, cultural geography and world politics
- Adds a new ecocritical dimension to scholarship on Israeli and Palestinian literatures
- Covers a broad range of contemporary Israeli and Palestinian authors including Mourid Barghouti, Sayed Kashua and Amos Oz
Research Interests: Cultural Geography, World Literatures, Climate Change, Water, Natural Resources, and 15 morePostcolonial Studies, Twentieth Century Literature, Environmental Politics, Palestinian Literature, Postcolonial Theory, Contemporary Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, Israeli Literature, Twenty-first Century Literature, Zionism, Settler Colonial Studies, Hydropolitics, and Postcolonial Ecocriticism
Please email for a copy. Forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Literature and the Environment, ed. by Sharae Deckard, Treasa De Loughry and Kerstin Oloff. This chapter examines water and waste in two contemporary Palestinian texts:... more
Please email for a copy. Forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Literature and the Environment, ed. by Sharae Deckard, Treasa De Loughry and Kerstin Oloff.
This chapter examines water and waste in two contemporary Palestinian texts: Raja Shehadeh’s 2007 memoir Palestinian Walks and Saleem Haddad’s short story ‘Song of the Birds’, published in Basma Ghalayini’s 2019 edited collection Palestine +100. In doing so, it foregrounds the relevance of anthropologist Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins’ notion of ‘waste siege’ (2020) to literary scholars. This chapter argues that Shehadeh and Haddad’s texts show the extent to which inadequate water and waste infrastructure is a constitutive feature of Palestinian life in the occupied territories, which manifests in different ways in their respective settings of the West Bank and Gaza. In portraying the environmental harms of Israeli occupation, Shehadeh and Haddad offer a counterpoint to narratives of superior Israeli environmental concern that serve to undermine Palestinian sovereignty. Shehadeh and Haddad’s texts are in genres that are rare in Palestinian literature – nature writing (Shehadeh) and science fiction (Haddad) – yet that intersect with world-literary trends. These are both genres that are concerned, in different ways, with time. I argue that Shehadeh and Haddad’s use of these world-literary genres increases the appeal of their texts to metropolitan readers. The genres of nature writing and sci-fi also give Shehadeh and Haddad particular tools for engaging with the temporalities of waste siege, including its implications for Palestine’s future.
This chapter examines water and waste in two contemporary Palestinian texts: Raja Shehadeh’s 2007 memoir Palestinian Walks and Saleem Haddad’s short story ‘Song of the Birds’, published in Basma Ghalayini’s 2019 edited collection Palestine +100. In doing so, it foregrounds the relevance of anthropologist Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins’ notion of ‘waste siege’ (2020) to literary scholars. This chapter argues that Shehadeh and Haddad’s texts show the extent to which inadequate water and waste infrastructure is a constitutive feature of Palestinian life in the occupied territories, which manifests in different ways in their respective settings of the West Bank and Gaza. In portraying the environmental harms of Israeli occupation, Shehadeh and Haddad offer a counterpoint to narratives of superior Israeli environmental concern that serve to undermine Palestinian sovereignty. Shehadeh and Haddad’s texts are in genres that are rare in Palestinian literature – nature writing (Shehadeh) and science fiction (Haddad) – yet that intersect with world-literary trends. These are both genres that are concerned, in different ways, with time. I argue that Shehadeh and Haddad’s use of these world-literary genres increases the appeal of their texts to metropolitan readers. The genres of nature writing and sci-fi also give Shehadeh and Haddad particular tools for engaging with the temporalities of waste siege, including its implications for Palestine’s future.
Research Interests: Israel/Palestine, Discard Studies, Environmental Politics, Palestinian Literature, Ecocriticism, and 9 moreMemoir and Autobiography, Environmental Humanities, Hydropolitics, Palestinian Studies, Memoir, Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Short Stories, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Postcolonial Ecocriticism
Please email for a copy. Forthcoming in special issue of Interventions on Commodity Fictions, ed. by Chris Campbell, Mike Niblett, Christine Okoth and Esthie Hugo. Water has long been fundamental to settler efforts to expand resource... more
Please email for a copy. Forthcoming in special issue of Interventions on Commodity Fictions, ed. by Chris Campbell, Mike Niblett, Christine Okoth and Esthie Hugo.
Water has long been fundamental to settler efforts to expand resource frontiers in Canada. European fur traders used the region’s waterways to access animal populations in its interior, forming the basis of an ambivalent national reputation as “hewers of wood, drawers of water” (Innis 1930). More recently, the Trans-Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project and BC Hydro’s Site C Dam have threatened water and Indigenous sovereignty in the pursuit of energy. Canada’s national imaginary is dominated by pristine water (Bakker 2007, 1), yet this image exists alongside and has enabled unjust and extractive hydrological relations. In recent years, Canada has emerged as a major locus of production of ecopoetry, with poets also participating in environmental direct action. This article argues that water has become a key preoccupation for contemporary Canadian ecopoets, who use poetry to highlight historical and ongoing colonial injustices, and draw attention to threats to water in Canada today. It analyses three long poems set on different rivers in British Columbia: Rita Wong and Fred Wah’s beholden: a poem as long as the river (2019), Sarah de Leeuw’s Skeena (2015) and Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars (2015). It shows that these texts represent water as central to Canadian histories of resource extraction, and argues that these poems offer broader insights of relevance to the emerging field of hydropoetics, particularly the value of the long poem for writing about water. It concludes that hydropoetry can help envision an alternative “stance toward the living planet” (Hume and Osborne 2018: 9) and to its water.
Water has long been fundamental to settler efforts to expand resource frontiers in Canada. European fur traders used the region’s waterways to access animal populations in its interior, forming the basis of an ambivalent national reputation as “hewers of wood, drawers of water” (Innis 1930). More recently, the Trans-Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project and BC Hydro’s Site C Dam have threatened water and Indigenous sovereignty in the pursuit of energy. Canada’s national imaginary is dominated by pristine water (Bakker 2007, 1), yet this image exists alongside and has enabled unjust and extractive hydrological relations. In recent years, Canada has emerged as a major locus of production of ecopoetry, with poets also participating in environmental direct action. This article argues that water has become a key preoccupation for contemporary Canadian ecopoets, who use poetry to highlight historical and ongoing colonial injustices, and draw attention to threats to water in Canada today. It analyses three long poems set on different rivers in British Columbia: Rita Wong and Fred Wah’s beholden: a poem as long as the river (2019), Sarah de Leeuw’s Skeena (2015) and Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars (2015). It shows that these texts represent water as central to Canadian histories of resource extraction, and argues that these poems offer broader insights of relevance to the emerging field of hydropoetics, particularly the value of the long poem for writing about water. It concludes that hydropoetry can help envision an alternative “stance toward the living planet” (Hume and Osborne 2018: 9) and to its water.
Research Interests: Canadian Studies, English Literature, Environmental History, Canadian Literature, Poetics, and 14 moreEnvironmental Politics, Rivers, Water History, Big Dams, Ecocriticism, Environmental Justice, Water Pollution, Environmental Humanities, Canadian poetry, Hydropolitics, Hydroelectric power, Water Justice, Reservoirs, and Hydroelectric dams
Please email for a copy. Forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Energy Humanities, ed. by Graeme Macdonald and Janet Stewart. Opening paragraph: It is impossible to think about energy without thinking about water. Many of the... more
Please email for a copy. Forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Energy Humanities, ed. by Graeme Macdonald and Janet Stewart.
Opening paragraph:
It is impossible to think about energy without thinking about water. Many of the world’s bodies of water are sites of energy extraction and subjected to some of the oil industry’s most devastating violence, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Niger Delta. Water is crucial to the extraction, processing, refinement and transportation of fossil and nuclear energy, often with less visible but equally long-term impacts on water supply, as recognised by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in their protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (Estes 2019). The impacts of fossil fuels on our climate are primarily registered in watery terms, through fears of rising sea levels and ‘water wars’. Access to fresh water, meanwhile, often depends on the use of fossil fuels: water must be pumped, purified and delivered to point of use, a process that is becoming increasingly energy-intensive with the rise of desalination. Water, then, is deeply implicated in the fossil fuel economy. It also provides the basis for alternatives. We might think first of hydropower dams, the dominant source of renewable energy, and a booming industry once again (Boelens, Shah and Bruins 2019). Yet the green credentials of big dams have justifiably been called into question (Deemer et al. 2016), just as their production of mass displacement is now widely recognised. Nevertheless, thinking with water itself can have valuable ecological ends. The substance of water provides a reminder of the inextricability of our bodies from the world and from each other, and a prompt to imagine different, non-exploitative relationships with nonhuman nature that renew the notion of the commons and look towards a future beyond extractivism (Gómez-Barris 2017).
Opening paragraph:
It is impossible to think about energy without thinking about water. Many of the world’s bodies of water are sites of energy extraction and subjected to some of the oil industry’s most devastating violence, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Niger Delta. Water is crucial to the extraction, processing, refinement and transportation of fossil and nuclear energy, often with less visible but equally long-term impacts on water supply, as recognised by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in their protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (Estes 2019). The impacts of fossil fuels on our climate are primarily registered in watery terms, through fears of rising sea levels and ‘water wars’. Access to fresh water, meanwhile, often depends on the use of fossil fuels: water must be pumped, purified and delivered to point of use, a process that is becoming increasingly energy-intensive with the rise of desalination. Water, then, is deeply implicated in the fossil fuel economy. It also provides the basis for alternatives. We might think first of hydropower dams, the dominant source of renewable energy, and a booming industry once again (Boelens, Shah and Bruins 2019). Yet the green credentials of big dams have justifiably been called into question (Deemer et al. 2016), just as their production of mass displacement is now widely recognised. Nevertheless, thinking with water itself can have valuable ecological ends. The substance of water provides a reminder of the inextricability of our bodies from the world and from each other, and a prompt to imagine different, non-exploitative relationships with nonhuman nature that renew the notion of the commons and look towards a future beyond extractivism (Gómez-Barris 2017).
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Urban Geography, Japanese Studies, Technology, Feminist Theory, Water, and 15 moreDisability Studies, Critical Disability Studies, Homelessness, Feminist Disability Studies, Urban Planning, Urban Studies, Japan, Public Space, Disability, Cities, Infrastructure, Public Toilets, Water Infrastructure, Architecture and Public Spaces, and Gig Economy
Article for The Conversation, October 2023: https://theconversation.com/minor-detail-book-how-the-language-of-the-past-can-help-us-read-the-present-situation-in-palestine-216201
Research Interests:
Chapter co-written with Nicole Seymour, book edited by Jaimie Baron, Kristen Fuhs. After a deadly virus leapt (possibly) from bats or pangolins to humans in late 2019, much of the quarantined Western world found itself enraptured by... more
Chapter co-written with Nicole Seymour, book edited by Jaimie Baron, Kristen Fuhs.
After a deadly virus leapt (possibly) from bats or pangolins to humans in late 2019, much of the quarantined Western world found itself enraptured by the spectacle of another boundary breach: humans handling wild cats on Netflix’s documentary series Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness. In its thematization of animal and human captivity in the institutions of the zoo and the prison, Tiger King spoke in unexpected ways to viewers trapped at home and raised parallel questions about the ethics of caging animals and, perhaps, humans. This chapter brings together scholarship from film and media studies, animal studies, and queer theory to draw out the queer ecological dimensions of Tiger King, situating it as an unorthodox phenomenon in contemporary environmental broadcasting and what Nicole has described elsewhere as a work of “low environmental culture.” We begin by examining representations of the program’s protagonists, Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin, in the emerging world of “digital drag,” before turning to the portrayal of Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in the series, which we read in the context of the cultural meanings of zoos, tigers and “liveness.” In doing so, we highlight the extent to which the program prompted critical reflection on the normative human family amid the retrenchment of conservative domestic norms during the COVID-19 pandemic.
After a deadly virus leapt (possibly) from bats or pangolins to humans in late 2019, much of the quarantined Western world found itself enraptured by the spectacle of another boundary breach: humans handling wild cats on Netflix’s documentary series Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness. In its thematization of animal and human captivity in the institutions of the zoo and the prison, Tiger King spoke in unexpected ways to viewers trapped at home and raised parallel questions about the ethics of caging animals and, perhaps, humans. This chapter brings together scholarship from film and media studies, animal studies, and queer theory to draw out the queer ecological dimensions of Tiger King, situating it as an unorthodox phenomenon in contemporary environmental broadcasting and what Nicole has described elsewhere as a work of “low environmental culture.” We begin by examining representations of the program’s protagonists, Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin, in the emerging world of “digital drag,” before turning to the portrayal of Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park in the series, which we read in the context of the cultural meanings of zoos, tigers and “liveness.” In doing so, we highlight the extent to which the program prompted critical reflection on the normative human family amid the retrenchment of conservative domestic norms during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Research Interests:
Published open access: https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/14/3/661/319761/Theorizing-the-Gay-Frog The gay frog has taken on a surprisingly prominent role in contemporary environmental culture. Primarily... more
Published open access: https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/14/3/661/319761/Theorizing-the-Gay-Frog
The gay frog has taken on a surprisingly prominent role in contemporary environmental culture. Primarily associated with American shock-jock Alex Jones and the “alt-right” movement, fears of frogs being turned gay by hormones in water have nevertheless entered the mainstream, while gay frog memes are shared online by users from across the political spectrum. This article offers a genealogy of the gay frog, situating this recent moment in the longer history of “sex panics” over gay animals described by queer ecologists, and in the context of an ongoing backlash against feminism and trans liberation. It argues that the potency of the gay frog as alt-right symbol derives from the capacity of the frog to instantiate racialised and sexualised anxieties about border crossings. By examining the role of humour in gay frog clips and memes, this article shows how liberal mockery of Jones has inadvertently mainstreamed far-right beliefs and served to consolidate alt-right notions of victimhood. In spite of this, it argues that the comic potential of the gay frog holds promise for queer ecologists seeking to think differently about sex and nature.
The gay frog has taken on a surprisingly prominent role in contemporary environmental culture. Primarily associated with American shock-jock Alex Jones and the “alt-right” movement, fears of frogs being turned gay by hormones in water have nevertheless entered the mainstream, while gay frog memes are shared online by users from across the political spectrum. This article offers a genealogy of the gay frog, situating this recent moment in the longer history of “sex panics” over gay animals described by queer ecologists, and in the context of an ongoing backlash against feminism and trans liberation. It argues that the potency of the gay frog as alt-right symbol derives from the capacity of the frog to instantiate racialised and sexualised anxieties about border crossings. By examining the role of humour in gay frog clips and memes, this article shows how liberal mockery of Jones has inadvertently mainstreamed far-right beliefs and served to consolidate alt-right notions of victimhood. In spite of this, it argues that the comic potential of the gay frog holds promise for queer ecologists seeking to think differently about sex and nature.
Research Interests:
Contribution to 'Legacies - 9/11 and the War on Terror at 20', edited by Jay Shelat. Available online: https://post45.org/2021/09/girls-like-us/
Research Interests:
Available open access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/9/3/76. ‘Water wars’ are back. Conflicts in Syrian, Yemen and Israel/Palestine are regularly framed as motivated by water and presented as harbingers of a world to come. The return of... more
Available open access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/9/3/76. ‘Water wars’ are back. Conflicts in Syrian, Yemen and Israel/Palestine are regularly framed as motivated by water and presented as harbingers of a world to come. The return of ‘water wars’ rhetoric, long after its 1990s heyday, has been paralleled by an increasing interest among novelists in water as a cause of conflict. This literature has been under-explored in existing work in the Blue Humanities, while scholarship on cli-fi has focused on scenarios of too much water, rather than not enough. In this article I catalogue key features of what I call the ‘water wars novel’, surveying works by Paolo Bacigalupi, Sarnath Banerjee, Varda Burstyn, Assaf Gavron, Emmi Itäranta, Karen Jayes and Cameron Stracher, writing from the United States, India, Canada, Israel, Finland and South Africa. I identify the water wars novel as a distinctive and increasingly prominent mode of ‘cli-fi’ that reveals and obscures important dimensions of water crises of the past, present and future.
Research Interests: American Literature, World Literatures, Water, Dystopian Literature, Postcolonial Studies, and 15 morePolitical Ecology, Water resources, Contemporary Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Ecocriticism, South African Literature, Environmental Humanities, Indian Literature, Comics and Graphic Novels, Hydropolitics, Water Wars, Water scarcity, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Blue Humanities, and Climate Fiction
Accepted version of article published in Textual Practice, 2020. In recent years ecocriticism and the environmental humanities have undergone a 'hydrological turn', sometimes referred to as the emergence of the 'blue humanities'. This... more
Accepted version of article published in Textual Practice, 2020.
In recent years ecocriticism and the environmental humanities have undergone a 'hydrological turn', sometimes referred to as the emergence of the 'blue humanities'. This 'turn' has, however, typically focused on the maritime and oceanic rather than the fresh water essential for the reproduction of much life on earth. In this article I analyse contemporary Canadian poet Rita Wong's 2015 collection undercurrent for thematic and formal insights into how dominant ways of understanding water have enabled its exploitation within the capitalist world-system. I argue that Wong's poetry resists a concept that geographer Jamie Linton calls 'modern water' (2010: 14), or water as ultimately reducible to abstract molecules of 'H₂O' circulating within the hydrological cycle. Wong's poems illustrate how this concept has facilitated the exhaustion and contamination of the world's water in the pursuit of profit, amplifying these concerns in formal strategies that situate local Canadian water histories within what Jason W. Moore describes as capitalism's 'world-ecological regime'. I combine world-systems theory with Indigenous, ecofeminist and posthumanist thought to show how Wong's poetry models non-anthropocentric modes of relating to water and other water-dependent beings that move towards environmental justice.
In recent years ecocriticism and the environmental humanities have undergone a 'hydrological turn', sometimes referred to as the emergence of the 'blue humanities'. This 'turn' has, however, typically focused on the maritime and oceanic rather than the fresh water essential for the reproduction of much life on earth. In this article I analyse contemporary Canadian poet Rita Wong's 2015 collection undercurrent for thematic and formal insights into how dominant ways of understanding water have enabled its exploitation within the capitalist world-system. I argue that Wong's poetry resists a concept that geographer Jamie Linton calls 'modern water' (2010: 14), or water as ultimately reducible to abstract molecules of 'H₂O' circulating within the hydrological cycle. Wong's poems illustrate how this concept has facilitated the exhaustion and contamination of the world's water in the pursuit of profit, amplifying these concerns in formal strategies that situate local Canadian water histories within what Jason W. Moore describes as capitalism's 'world-ecological regime'. I combine world-systems theory with Indigenous, ecofeminist and posthumanist thought to show how Wong's poetry models non-anthropocentric modes of relating to water and other water-dependent beings that move towards environmental justice.
Research Interests: Cultural Geography, Water, Postcolonial Studies, Posthumanism, Canadian Literature, and 12 moreEnvironmental Politics, Water History, Contemporary Literature, Ecocriticism, Contemporary Poetry, Environmental Humanities, Hydropolitics, Infrastructure, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Ecopoetry & Poetics, World-Ecology, and Blue Humanities
In JCL special issue on Postcolonial Environments, 2016. In this article I examine the representation of the River Jordan and ecological crisis in recent works by two of Palestine’s best-known writers: the poem “A River Dies of Thirst”... more
In JCL special issue on Postcolonial Environments, 2016.
In this article I examine the representation of the River Jordan and ecological crisis in recent works by two of Palestine’s best-known writers: the poem “A River Dies of Thirst” by Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti’s memoir I Saw Ramallah. Ecocritics have paid scant attention to these writers’ works, or to Palestinian literature in general; but the environment is a major domain of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and ownership of the River Jordan is a key source of tension, often discussed within the framework of “water wars”. The River Jordan is currently in a highly degraded state due to pollution and the diversion of most of its waters by Israel. I examine the ways in which Darwish and Barghouti portray the Jordan’s ecological decline as the outcome of Palestinian dispossession and Israeli occupation, suggesting that the texts form a literary counterpart to claims by Palestinian activists and solidarity groups of what Al Butmah and colleagues termed an “environmental Nakba”. In particular, I build on Tricia Cusack’s work on “riverscapes” and nationalism in order to draw out the different strategies used by both Darwish and Barghouti to express the impact of the loss of the River Jordan on Palestinian communities. While Darwish emphasizes the affective and communal consequences of Israel’s exhaustion of the river, in a poem which can be read as an environmental analogue to Palestinian “memorial books”, Barghouti stresses the links between hydropolitics and uneven development in the present day. I conclude with a caution about Darwish and Barghouti’s shared reliance on an anthropocentric discourse of theft and ownership, which, I argue, ultimately facilitates unsustainable water use.
In this article I examine the representation of the River Jordan and ecological crisis in recent works by two of Palestine’s best-known writers: the poem “A River Dies of Thirst” by Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti’s memoir I Saw Ramallah. Ecocritics have paid scant attention to these writers’ works, or to Palestinian literature in general; but the environment is a major domain of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and ownership of the River Jordan is a key source of tension, often discussed within the framework of “water wars”. The River Jordan is currently in a highly degraded state due to pollution and the diversion of most of its waters by Israel. I examine the ways in which Darwish and Barghouti portray the Jordan’s ecological decline as the outcome of Palestinian dispossession and Israeli occupation, suggesting that the texts form a literary counterpart to claims by Palestinian activists and solidarity groups of what Al Butmah and colleagues termed an “environmental Nakba”. In particular, I build on Tricia Cusack’s work on “riverscapes” and nationalism in order to draw out the different strategies used by both Darwish and Barghouti to express the impact of the loss of the River Jordan on Palestinian communities. While Darwish emphasizes the affective and communal consequences of Israel’s exhaustion of the river, in a poem which can be read as an environmental analogue to Palestinian “memorial books”, Barghouti stresses the links between hydropolitics and uneven development in the present day. I conclude with a caution about Darwish and Barghouti’s shared reliance on an anthropocentric discourse of theft and ownership, which, I argue, ultimately facilitates unsustainable water use.
Research Interests: Water, Postcolonial Studies, Environmental History, Water resources, Nationalism, and 12 moreIsrael/Palestine, National Identity, Rivers, Palestinian Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Ecocriticism, Environmental Justice, Environmental Humanities, Environmentalism, Hydropolitics, Water Wars, and Postcolonial Ecocriticism
Research Interests:
University of York, 2016. This thesis examines the representation of water in Israeli and Palestinian literature, from the early years of Zionist settlement at the start of the twentieth century, to the daily violence of today’s ongoing... more
University of York, 2016.
This thesis examines the representation of water in Israeli and Palestinian literature, from the early years of Zionist settlement at the start of the twentieth century, to the daily violence of today’s ongoing occupation. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on disciplines including cultural geography, science and technology studies, and, inevitably, politics. At the same time, it situates these explorations in the context of the increasingly fevered contemporary debates on ‘water wars’, global water crisis, and the Anthropocene. In doing so, it demonstrates the many ways in which water intersects with Israeli and Palestinian cultures, at the same time as indicating the potential for literary approaches to deepen and critique existing political, scientific and corporate discourse on the future of the world’s water.
Literary critics have so far had little to say about water. Land has always seemed more politically important and cultural meaningful. The significance of land appears dramatically amplified in the context of Israel/Palestine, where issues of land, borders and sovereignty remain painful and unresolved. This neglect of water exists in spite of a growing trend towards reading literature for its representations of resources, most prominently in the subject of ‘petrofiction’. No resource, however, is more fundamental than water.
In bringing water to the forefront, this thesis has significant implications for future research in Israeli and Palestinian literary studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on water to open up an array of new texts for exploration, and for literary research to productively complicate and enrich our understanding of, as well as our relationship with, the ubiquitous, and far more than merely ‘natural’ substance of water.
This thesis examines the representation of water in Israeli and Palestinian literature, from the early years of Zionist settlement at the start of the twentieth century, to the daily violence of today’s ongoing occupation. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on disciplines including cultural geography, science and technology studies, and, inevitably, politics. At the same time, it situates these explorations in the context of the increasingly fevered contemporary debates on ‘water wars’, global water crisis, and the Anthropocene. In doing so, it demonstrates the many ways in which water intersects with Israeli and Palestinian cultures, at the same time as indicating the potential for literary approaches to deepen and critique existing political, scientific and corporate discourse on the future of the world’s water.
Literary critics have so far had little to say about water. Land has always seemed more politically important and cultural meaningful. The significance of land appears dramatically amplified in the context of Israel/Palestine, where issues of land, borders and sovereignty remain painful and unresolved. This neglect of water exists in spite of a growing trend towards reading literature for its representations of resources, most prominently in the subject of ‘petrofiction’. No resource, however, is more fundamental than water.
In bringing water to the forefront, this thesis has significant implications for future research in Israeli and Palestinian literary studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, and the environmental humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on water to open up an array of new texts for exploration, and for literary research to productively complicate and enrich our understanding of, as well as our relationship with, the ubiquitous, and far more than merely ‘natural’ substance of water.
Research Interests:
Review of Sara Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. Forthcoming in Radical Philosophy. Please email for a copy.
Research Interests:
Available OA: https://humanimalia.org/article/view/16417
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Review essay on Erik Swyngedouw's 'Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth Century Spain' and Ruth Morgan's 'Running Out?: Water in Western Australia'. Forthcoming in special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing on... more
Review essay on Erik Swyngedouw's 'Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth Century Spain' and Ruth Morgan's 'Running Out?: Water in Western Australia'. Forthcoming in special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing on natural resources. Please email for a copy.
Research Interests:
Panel with Matthew Whittle (Kent) and Sophia Brown (Freie Universität Berlin) for EACLALS 2023: Imagining Environmental Justice in a Postcolonial World Climate change is likely to increase displacements across the Global South, as hotter... more
Panel with Matthew Whittle (Kent) and Sophia Brown (Freie Universität Berlin) for EACLALS 2023: Imagining Environmental Justice in a Postcolonial World
Climate change is likely to increase displacements across the Global South, as hotter temperatures contribute to desertification and droughts. This panel explores how climate-induced displacement brings with it the reinforcement of settler colonial domination as well as a rise in anti-immigration authoritarianism, whereby forced migration is treated as a ‘national security’ concern by wealthy nations in the Global North (Miller 2017; Malm and the
Zetkin Collective 2021). In doing so, we take up Rob Nixon’s neglected provocation in Slow Violence (2019) that ecocriticism has been reluctant to engage with the environmental impacts of US foreign policy. In discussing novels and films that stage the relationship between the climate crisis and displacement, we examine how cultural perspectives confront the colonial and neocolonial contexts underpinning internal and global migration and the
dominant narratives concerning climate refugees.
The panel’s three papers focus on narratives that resist Orientalist or determinist explanations of climate-induced displacement and foreground the historical and political causes of migration (Selby, Daoust and Hoffmann, 2022). Matthew Whittle’s paper analyses Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) and John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) to examine how an eco-dystopian imaginary is ‘Janus-faced’. On the one hand, it has the capacity to
shock Anglophone readers out of apathy, paralysis, and inaction and incite a supranational response to climate change; on the other, dystopian narratives are also mobilised by governments to legitimise national isolationism, the strengthening of militarised borders, and ‘Hostile Environment’ immigration policies. Sophia Brown looks to El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise (2021), analysing its reception as a novel about the 'migrant crisis' and Syria's war,
while foregrounding how El Akkad narrates the intersection of this contemporary context with climate change and histories of colonialism and violence. Brown locates the novel within cli-fi debates and in comparison with American War to reflect on the expectations of the Anglophone literary marketplace when it comes to both climate fiction and Arab authors. Hannah Boast’s paper brings together literature, art, and cultural projects to foreground Palestinian experiences. Boast engages with Nixon’s notion of ‘displacement without moving’, which names how communities are left ‘stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable’. An analysis of the short story collection Palestine+100, the films of Larissa Sansour and Jumana Manna, and Vivien Sansour’s Palestine Heirloom Seed Library enables an examination of Palestinian artistic resistance to the environmental impacts of Israel’s ongoing colonial project.
Together, these papers show how literary and artistic perspectives allow us to attend to neglected experiences of internal and global displacement, highlight the environmental impacts of colonialism, and foreground alternative environmental imaginaries. In doing so, they help to enable a reorientation of the climate conversation away from rhetoric that stokes immigration panics and towards environmental justice.
Biographical note
Hannah Boast is Ad Astra Fellow and Assistant Professor at University College Dublin, and author of Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature (EUP, 2020). Sophia Brown is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin as part of the PalREAD project, where she is completing a monograph on Palestinian
life writing. Matthew Whittle is a Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent. His forthcoming co-authored book is Global Literature and the Environment: Twenty First Century Perspectives (Routledge).
Climate change is likely to increase displacements across the Global South, as hotter temperatures contribute to desertification and droughts. This panel explores how climate-induced displacement brings with it the reinforcement of settler colonial domination as well as a rise in anti-immigration authoritarianism, whereby forced migration is treated as a ‘national security’ concern by wealthy nations in the Global North (Miller 2017; Malm and the
Zetkin Collective 2021). In doing so, we take up Rob Nixon’s neglected provocation in Slow Violence (2019) that ecocriticism has been reluctant to engage with the environmental impacts of US foreign policy. In discussing novels and films that stage the relationship between the climate crisis and displacement, we examine how cultural perspectives confront the colonial and neocolonial contexts underpinning internal and global migration and the
dominant narratives concerning climate refugees.
The panel’s three papers focus on narratives that resist Orientalist or determinist explanations of climate-induced displacement and foreground the historical and political causes of migration (Selby, Daoust and Hoffmann, 2022). Matthew Whittle’s paper analyses Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) and John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) to examine how an eco-dystopian imaginary is ‘Janus-faced’. On the one hand, it has the capacity to
shock Anglophone readers out of apathy, paralysis, and inaction and incite a supranational response to climate change; on the other, dystopian narratives are also mobilised by governments to legitimise national isolationism, the strengthening of militarised borders, and ‘Hostile Environment’ immigration policies. Sophia Brown looks to El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise (2021), analysing its reception as a novel about the 'migrant crisis' and Syria's war,
while foregrounding how El Akkad narrates the intersection of this contemporary context with climate change and histories of colonialism and violence. Brown locates the novel within cli-fi debates and in comparison with American War to reflect on the expectations of the Anglophone literary marketplace when it comes to both climate fiction and Arab authors. Hannah Boast’s paper brings together literature, art, and cultural projects to foreground Palestinian experiences. Boast engages with Nixon’s notion of ‘displacement without moving’, which names how communities are left ‘stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable’. An analysis of the short story collection Palestine+100, the films of Larissa Sansour and Jumana Manna, and Vivien Sansour’s Palestine Heirloom Seed Library enables an examination of Palestinian artistic resistance to the environmental impacts of Israel’s ongoing colonial project.
Together, these papers show how literary and artistic perspectives allow us to attend to neglected experiences of internal and global displacement, highlight the environmental impacts of colonialism, and foreground alternative environmental imaginaries. In doing so, they help to enable a reorientation of the climate conversation away from rhetoric that stokes immigration panics and towards environmental justice.
Biographical note
Hannah Boast is Ad Astra Fellow and Assistant Professor at University College Dublin, and author of Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature (EUP, 2020). Sophia Brown is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin as part of the PalREAD project, where she is completing a monograph on Palestinian
life writing. Matthew Whittle is a Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent. His forthcoming co-authored book is Global Literature and the Environment: Twenty First Century Perspectives (Routledge).
Research Interests:
Seas and Shores, Edinburgh Napier University, 24 May 2023. This paper gives an overview of some meanings of the sea in contemporary Palestinian literature and culture through drawing on unpublished work from my monograph Hydrofictions:... more
Seas and Shores, Edinburgh Napier University, 24 May 2023. This paper gives an overview of some meanings of the sea in contemporary Palestinian literature and culture through drawing on unpublished work from my monograph Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and a new chapter for the Routledge Companion to Environmental Humanities, ed. by Oloff, Deckard, Westall and De Loughry. I focus particularly on representations of the Gaza shore, a site which is simultaneously a popular leisure destination for families trapped in one of the most densely populated areas on Earth; an area of important economic activity, fishing, which is curtailed by arbitrary Israeli restrictions on maritime mobility; an ecologically threatened site as a result of the underdevelopment and repeated Israeli bombing of Gaza's sewage infrastructure; and a militarised space in which Palestinians have been subjected to shocking spectacles of Israeli violence, notably the killing of four children during Israel's assault on Gaza of 2014. I discuss the photographs of Tanya Habjouqa, in which representations of the sea serve to contest stereotyped representations of Gazan life, and Saleem Haddad's short story 'Song of the Birds', from Palestine+100 (ed. Basma Ghalayini, 2019), which addresses the beach as a site of Israeli political and ecological violence in a sci-fi mode. I also bring in other examples of the sea from contemporary Palestinian literature and culture, including Raja Shehadeh, Adania Shibli, and graffiti by Alaa Albaba.
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Paper delivered at Gardens in the Gorse: A Northern Modernism seminar, University of Newcastle, October 2022. Sarah Hall’s novel Haweswater addresses the history of Mardale Green, a small Lake District farming village that was drowned... more
Paper delivered at Gardens in the Gorse: A Northern Modernism seminar, University of Newcastle, October 2022.
Sarah Hall’s novel Haweswater addresses the history of Mardale Green, a small Lake District farming village that was drowned in the 1930s for the construction of the Haweswater Reservoir. Hall’s novel is ostensibly a nostalgic story of forbidden rural romance, between a farmer’s daughter and a water board employee come to inform the villagers of their fate. Yet as Dominic Head notes (2020), Hall renews the traditional genre of rural writing by integrating contemporary concerns. In this paper, I argue that Haweswater offers a nuanced portrait of the impacts of hydromodernist (Swyngedouw 2015) projects on British rural communities. Hall connects the fate of the villagers and dam workers to the sacrifice of working-class British soldiers in the First and Second World Wars, and hints, through references to the shifting fortunes of the British Empire, to the impacts of colonial hydromodernism elsewhere. The publication date of Hall’s novel is significant to my argument. Published in 2002, Haweswater followed the backlash against megadams of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as Britain’s first post-privatization drought, in 1995, during what was then one of the hottest summers on record. Through returning to the 1930s, Haweswater offers a pointed critique of a lack of democratic participation in water management in the 1990s, that resonates more strongly than ever in our parched present.
Sarah Hall’s novel Haweswater addresses the history of Mardale Green, a small Lake District farming village that was drowned in the 1930s for the construction of the Haweswater Reservoir. Hall’s novel is ostensibly a nostalgic story of forbidden rural romance, between a farmer’s daughter and a water board employee come to inform the villagers of their fate. Yet as Dominic Head notes (2020), Hall renews the traditional genre of rural writing by integrating contemporary concerns. In this paper, I argue that Haweswater offers a nuanced portrait of the impacts of hydromodernist (Swyngedouw 2015) projects on British rural communities. Hall connects the fate of the villagers and dam workers to the sacrifice of working-class British soldiers in the First and Second World Wars, and hints, through references to the shifting fortunes of the British Empire, to the impacts of colonial hydromodernism elsewhere. The publication date of Hall’s novel is significant to my argument. Published in 2002, Haweswater followed the backlash against megadams of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as Britain’s first post-privatization drought, in 1995, during what was then one of the hottest summers on record. Through returning to the 1930s, Haweswater offers a pointed critique of a lack of democratic participation in water management in the 1990s, that resonates more strongly than ever in our parched present.
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New Voices in Postcolonial Studies, University of Leeds.
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Turning to Matter and Space in Israel-Palestine, SOAS.
Research Interests: Postcolonial Studies, Water resources, Israel/Palestine, Palestine, Palestinian Literature, and 10 moreEnvironmental Humanities, Palestinian Culture, Hydropolitics, Palestinian Studies, Infrastructure, Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Palestinians in Israel, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, and Blue Humanities
World Literature and the Blue Humanities, University of Warwick.
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Centre for Contemporary Literature, University of Birmingham.
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With Nicole Seymour. Environmental Humanities research group, Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Cultures Anglophones Humanités (LARCA), Université de Paris.
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Paper delivered at 'From morning hunt to beloved gazelle: literary and visual representations of animals from Central Asia to the Maghreb', University of Cambridge, 15-17 December 2021. In August 2016, Anglophone media outlets found... more
Paper delivered at 'From morning hunt to beloved gazelle: literary and visual representations of animals from Central Asia to the Maghreb', University of Cambridge, 15-17 December 2021.
In August 2016, Anglophone media outlets found themselves with an unusual angle on the Israel-Palestine conflict: the last remaining animals at Khan Younis Zoo in Gaza were to be evacuated. Often described as the ‘world’s worst zoo’ (Tenorio 2016), workers had struggled to maintain humane conditions under Israeli siege, with the zoo previously making headlines after deciding to taxidermy its dead charges. Now Vienna-based animal welfare organisation Four Paws was to remove the remaining animals to new homes in Israel, Jordan and South Africa. Palestinians and their supporters often use the language of animal captivity and animalisation to describe life under Israeli rule (Braverman 2017). The evacuation presented a cruel new twist on this framing in which, as many noted, it seemed better to be an animal than a Palestinian.
In recent years environmental issues have come to the fore in Palestine/Israel as Israel has positioned itself as a pioneer in environmental technologies and conservation. While typically framed as care for a shared environment, Israeli environmental concern often serves to justify Israeli control of land and resources in a continuation of older colonial discourses of environmental degradation (Davis and Burke 2011: 15). The stark conditions for human life in Palestine have often presented obstacles to advocating for animals and environment, as Penny Johnson (2019) and Lisa Suheir Majaj (2009: 65) have noted. Nevertheless, a number of films have recently emerged that address the lives of animals in Palestine, often linking human and animal predicaments and targeted at international audiences. In this paper I examine two of these films, Rani Massalha’s Giraffada (2013) and Waiting for Giraffes (2016), directed by Marco de Stefanis.
Both films focus on the giraffe population of Qalqilya Zoo, in the West Bank. Giraffada is a drama, apparently based on a true story, that depicts an attempt to steal a giraffe from the Ramat Gan safari park, near Tel Aviv, to replace the male partner of a female giraffe who had died after injuring himself during an Israeli attack. Waiting for Giraffes is a documentary that depicts the same process by more legitimate means, through negotiations with zoos in Israel and elsewhere, and through zoo efforts to reach international standards. I draw on recent scholarship on multispecies relations and animal rights in Palestine/Israel (Gutkowski 2020; Alloun 2018), and on zoos (Braverman 2013) to show how these films use representations of animals to counter stereotyped portrayals of Palestinians and challenge claims of a superior Israeli environmental sensibility. By portraying Palestinians as concerned for their giraffe population, rather than an indigenous species, the films make a case for Palestinian sovereignty via the unorthodox route of showing their care for the global environment, and adherence to the environmental values of the international community.
In August 2016, Anglophone media outlets found themselves with an unusual angle on the Israel-Palestine conflict: the last remaining animals at Khan Younis Zoo in Gaza were to be evacuated. Often described as the ‘world’s worst zoo’ (Tenorio 2016), workers had struggled to maintain humane conditions under Israeli siege, with the zoo previously making headlines after deciding to taxidermy its dead charges. Now Vienna-based animal welfare organisation Four Paws was to remove the remaining animals to new homes in Israel, Jordan and South Africa. Palestinians and their supporters often use the language of animal captivity and animalisation to describe life under Israeli rule (Braverman 2017). The evacuation presented a cruel new twist on this framing in which, as many noted, it seemed better to be an animal than a Palestinian.
In recent years environmental issues have come to the fore in Palestine/Israel as Israel has positioned itself as a pioneer in environmental technologies and conservation. While typically framed as care for a shared environment, Israeli environmental concern often serves to justify Israeli control of land and resources in a continuation of older colonial discourses of environmental degradation (Davis and Burke 2011: 15). The stark conditions for human life in Palestine have often presented obstacles to advocating for animals and environment, as Penny Johnson (2019) and Lisa Suheir Majaj (2009: 65) have noted. Nevertheless, a number of films have recently emerged that address the lives of animals in Palestine, often linking human and animal predicaments and targeted at international audiences. In this paper I examine two of these films, Rani Massalha’s Giraffada (2013) and Waiting for Giraffes (2016), directed by Marco de Stefanis.
Both films focus on the giraffe population of Qalqilya Zoo, in the West Bank. Giraffada is a drama, apparently based on a true story, that depicts an attempt to steal a giraffe from the Ramat Gan safari park, near Tel Aviv, to replace the male partner of a female giraffe who had died after injuring himself during an Israeli attack. Waiting for Giraffes is a documentary that depicts the same process by more legitimate means, through negotiations with zoos in Israel and elsewhere, and through zoo efforts to reach international standards. I draw on recent scholarship on multispecies relations and animal rights in Palestine/Israel (Gutkowski 2020; Alloun 2018), and on zoos (Braverman 2013) to show how these films use representations of animals to counter stereotyped portrayals of Palestinians and challenge claims of a superior Israeli environmental sensibility. By portraying Palestinians as concerned for their giraffe population, rather than an indigenous species, the films make a case for Palestinian sovereignty via the unorthodox route of showing their care for the global environment, and adherence to the environmental values of the international community.
Research Interests:
Paper delivered at Wet feet? Flooding, resilience and the climate crisis, University of Sheffield, 19 May 2021 The increasingly frequent and often devastating floods that have hit the North of England in recent years are a reminder that... more
Paper delivered at Wet feet? Flooding, resilience and the climate crisis, University of Sheffield, 19 May 2021
The increasingly frequent and often devastating floods that have hit the North of England in recent years are a reminder that the residents of the global core are not exempt from the consequences of climate change. This paper turns to a rare literary engagement with these events, Mary and Bryan Talbot’s graphic novel Rain (2019). Set in a loosely fictionalised Hebden Bridge, Rain follows a queer couple as they become involved in local environmental activism and, in its culmination, experience the town’s catastrophic 2015 floods. Rain draws attention to class inequality and private land ownership as contributing factors in contemporary floods through its protagonists’ involvement in campaigns against grouse hunting, while offering wry comment on the composition of the British environmental movement via its queer protagonists. Bookended with panels depicting Alexander von Humboldt’s travels in the Americas, it makes striking use of the unique capacities of the graphic novel form to situate present-day British floods within the longer historical context of imperialist extractivism. At the same time, the novel’s wider political horizons, notably its investments in the EU and in homonormative queerness, suggest the impossibility of responding to climate change within the boundaries of contemporary British liberal politics.
The increasingly frequent and often devastating floods that have hit the North of England in recent years are a reminder that the residents of the global core are not exempt from the consequences of climate change. This paper turns to a rare literary engagement with these events, Mary and Bryan Talbot’s graphic novel Rain (2019). Set in a loosely fictionalised Hebden Bridge, Rain follows a queer couple as they become involved in local environmental activism and, in its culmination, experience the town’s catastrophic 2015 floods. Rain draws attention to class inequality and private land ownership as contributing factors in contemporary floods through its protagonists’ involvement in campaigns against grouse hunting, while offering wry comment on the composition of the British environmental movement via its queer protagonists. Bookended with panels depicting Alexander von Humboldt’s travels in the Americas, it makes striking use of the unique capacities of the graphic novel form to situate present-day British floods within the longer historical context of imperialist extractivism. At the same time, the novel’s wider political horizons, notably its investments in the EU and in homonormative queerness, suggest the impossibility of responding to climate change within the boundaries of contemporary British liberal politics.
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Guest talk at University of Exeter public event, 10 February 2021.
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University of Toronto Environmental Humanities Network, January 2021.
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University of Kent Postcolonial Seminar Series, March 2021. The creation of the state of Israel was as much an environmental project as a political project. Early twentieth-century Zionist halutzim, or pioneers, sought not only to... more
University of Kent Postcolonial Seminar Series, March 2021.
The creation of the state of Israel was as much an environmental project as a political project. Early twentieth-century Zionist halutzim, or pioneers, sought not only to acquire land but to reshape it, particularly through the redistribution of water. Of particular concern were Palestine's swamps, viewed as 'unproductive', malarial environments created by Arab neglect that could be 'redeemed' by Jewish labour and turned into farmland. These swamps were the subject of extensive drainage programmes in the 1920s that were replicated in the early years of the state and have become part of Israel's founding national narrative. These projects, however, had mixed consequences, with the drainage of the Hula wetlands in the 1950s transforming by the 1980s from an emblem of Zionism's technological triumph to its environmental hubris. This talk assesses responses to drainage in Israeli posters, photography and literature, including Peter Merom's Death of the Lake (1960) and Meir Shalev's The Blue Mountain (1988), arguing that representations of these lost environments often bring to the surface other stories written out of Israel's national narrative, including the expulsion of the Palestinians.
The creation of the state of Israel was as much an environmental project as a political project. Early twentieth-century Zionist halutzim, or pioneers, sought not only to acquire land but to reshape it, particularly through the redistribution of water. Of particular concern were Palestine's swamps, viewed as 'unproductive', malarial environments created by Arab neglect that could be 'redeemed' by Jewish labour and turned into farmland. These swamps were the subject of extensive drainage programmes in the 1920s that were replicated in the early years of the state and have become part of Israel's founding national narrative. These projects, however, had mixed consequences, with the drainage of the Hula wetlands in the 1950s transforming by the 1980s from an emblem of Zionism's technological triumph to its environmental hubris. This talk assesses responses to drainage in Israeli posters, photography and literature, including Peter Merom's Death of the Lake (1960) and Meir Shalev's The Blue Mountain (1988), arguing that representations of these lost environments often bring to the surface other stories written out of Israel's national narrative, including the expulsion of the Palestinians.
Research Interests:
Delivered at Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, October 2020
Research Interests: British Literature, Cultural Geography, English Literature, Indigenous Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and 11 moreAfrican Literature, Contemporary British Literature, Big Dams, World Literature, Contemporary American Literature, Contemporary Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Hydropower, Hydropolitics, Hydroelectric dams, and Postcolonial Ecocriticism
Online talk for the Greenhouse environmental humanities new books series.
Research Interests: Cultural Geography, Hebrew Literature, Arabic Literature, Israel Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and 13 moreIsrael/Palestine, Palestine, Palestinian Literature, Contemporary Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, Israeli Literature, Zionism, Israel, Hydropolitics, Palestinian Studies, and Postcolonial Ecocriticism
The megadam has returned as a favoured response to global water scarcity and energy shortages, reframed as a 'clean' technology. Yet recent years have seen spectacular failures of older dams – Oroville in California, Whaley Bridge in... more
The megadam has returned as a favoured response to global water scarcity and energy shortages, reframed as a 'clean' technology. Yet recent years have seen spectacular failures of older dams – Oroville in California, Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire – while new dam projects such as Site C in British Columbia have revived the controversies over displacement and expropriation that had come to define the megadam by the 1990s. This talk examines big dams in contemporary fiction, including works by Sarah Hall, Jon McGregor, Linda Hogan, Eric Gansworth and Namwali Serpell. It discusses how these authors engage with the legacies of twentieth-century hydromodernity in order to reflect on contemporary neocolonialism, social inequality and rural economic decline, and to offer alternative hydrosocial worlds.
Research Interests: American Literature, Cultural Geography, World Literatures, English Literature, Indigenous Studies, and 14 moreDevelopment Studies, Climate Change, Water, Canadian Literature, Big Dams, Contemporary Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Uneven and Combined Development, Development Induced Displacement, Hydropolitics, Realism, Displacement, Reservoirs, and Zambian Literature
Article version under review at Environmental Humanities - please email for a copy. Paper delivered at Sex and Nature, University of Exeter, June 2019.
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Invited lecture at University of Worcester, March 2019.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, English Literature, Feminist Theory, Literature, and 12 moreQueer Theory, Cultural Politics, Ecofeminism, Environmental Politics, Feminism, Ecocriticism, Water Pollution, Environmental Humanities, Ecocriticism and Ecofeminism, Far-Right Politics, Extreme and Far Right, and Ecocritical Theory
The selkie has enjoyed a revival of interest in popular culture following the release of the 2014 animated film Song of the Sea. This session will focus on David Thomson's neglected but enchanting The People of the Sea (1954), which... more
The selkie has enjoyed a revival of interest in popular culture following the release of the 2014 animated film Song of the Sea. This session will focus on David Thomson's neglected but enchanting The People of the Sea (1954), which recounts Thomson's journey around the Scottish Isles and the west of Ireland in search of selkie folklore. Travelling in the late 1940s, Thomson encounters a world in flux, with the arrival of council houses, sanitary officers, television, and, crucially, the new materials of paraffin and rubber rendering the seal-killing trade obsolete. Yet, as Thomson finds, selkie stories quietly persist. This talk examines the insights these stories might offer into economic transitions, understandings of human-nonhuman relationships, and the places of water and water creatures in myth and folklore.
University of Essex Myth Studies Group, February 2019.
University of Essex Myth Studies Group, February 2019.
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A short, public-facing talk on cuteness, colonialism and commodity frontiers via the sea otter at 'Creatures/Us', an evening event to accompany the exhibition 'Living with Animals' at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts.
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Marine Transgressions, University of Bristol, June 7-8 2018 Environmentalist David Orr, cited in Stephanie LeMenager’s Living Oil, writes that 'the meaning of water might be best approached in comparison with that other liquid to which... more
Marine Transgressions, University of Bristol, June 7-8 2018
Environmentalist David Orr, cited in Stephanie LeMenager’s Living Oil, writes that 'the meaning of water might be best approached in comparison with that other liquid to which we in the twentieth century are beholden: oil'. In this paper I take up this call by speculatively examining the ways in which borrowing from the methodologies of the rapidly developing field of ‘petrocriticism’, and situating water explicitly as a resource, might alter both our readings of literary and cultural texts and our perspectives on water itself. How might work developed in the context of ‘petrofictions’ enable us to trace the presence of water in literary texts where, like oil, it often feels far from the surface? How might our readings of literary texts be enriched by considering their relationship with what geographer Erik Swyngedouw has called ‘hydromodernity’? And, following the arguments of the Warwick Research Collective on world-literature and combined and uneven development: are there ways in which contestations over water management and governance might also be registered at the level of narrative form? This approach, I suggest, might productively sharpen our critical resources in ways that have not always been apparent in the ‘blue humanities’, a field which has often turned away from more direct engagements with urgent political and economic questions surrounding water access and distribution. In this talk I start to think through these questions by focusing on Rita Wong’s Undercurrent, highlighting the ways in which Wong's collection shows water’s entanglement with other networks of resources in a neoliberal ecology.
Environmentalist David Orr, cited in Stephanie LeMenager’s Living Oil, writes that 'the meaning of water might be best approached in comparison with that other liquid to which we in the twentieth century are beholden: oil'. In this paper I take up this call by speculatively examining the ways in which borrowing from the methodologies of the rapidly developing field of ‘petrocriticism’, and situating water explicitly as a resource, might alter both our readings of literary and cultural texts and our perspectives on water itself. How might work developed in the context of ‘petrofictions’ enable us to trace the presence of water in literary texts where, like oil, it often feels far from the surface? How might our readings of literary texts be enriched by considering their relationship with what geographer Erik Swyngedouw has called ‘hydromodernity’? And, following the arguments of the Warwick Research Collective on world-literature and combined and uneven development: are there ways in which contestations over water management and governance might also be registered at the level of narrative form? This approach, I suggest, might productively sharpen our critical resources in ways that have not always been apparent in the ‘blue humanities’, a field which has often turned away from more direct engagements with urgent political and economic questions surrounding water access and distribution. In this talk I start to think through these questions by focusing on Rita Wong’s Undercurrent, highlighting the ways in which Wong's collection shows water’s entanglement with other networks of resources in a neoliberal ecology.
Research Interests: World Literatures, Water, Literature, Water resources, World Literature, and 13 moreContemporary Literature, Ecocriticism, Environmental Justice, Contemporary Poetry, Ecopoetics, Water Pollution, Environmental Humanities, Hydropolitics, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Ecopoetry & Poetics, Ecopoetry, Petrofiction, and Blue Humanities
Talk to University of Birmingham Women and Non-Binary Association, 21 March 2018. How does a selfie become a weapon? In this talk Hannah will introduce her research on gender and nationalism in Israeli and Palestinian culture, discussing... more
Talk to University of Birmingham Women and Non-Binary Association, 21 March 2018.
How does a selfie become a weapon? In this talk Hannah will introduce her research on gender and nationalism in Israeli and Palestinian culture, discussing representations of Israel and the Israeli military in social media and pop culture that circulated in the summer of 2014, during Israel's 51-day war on Gaza. Bringing together IDF selfies, Gal Gadot's Instagram, and Israeli 'dark comedy' Zero Motivation, this talk will situate contemporary representations of women in the Israel Defence Forces in the longer historical context of Zionism's gender politics, as well as contemporary practices of 'pinkwashing' and 'greenwashing'. It will think critically about how pop cultural portrayals of the teenage girl soldier help to shape positive Euro-American perceptions of Israeli military action.
How does a selfie become a weapon? In this talk Hannah will introduce her research on gender and nationalism in Israeli and Palestinian culture, discussing representations of Israel and the Israeli military in social media and pop culture that circulated in the summer of 2014, during Israel's 51-day war on Gaza. Bringing together IDF selfies, Gal Gadot's Instagram, and Israeli 'dark comedy' Zero Motivation, this talk will situate contemporary representations of women in the Israel Defence Forces in the longer historical context of Zionism's gender politics, as well as contemporary practices of 'pinkwashing' and 'greenwashing'. It will think critically about how pop cultural portrayals of the teenage girl soldier help to shape positive Euro-American perceptions of Israeli military action.
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, Women's History, Israel Studies, and 40 morePopular Culture, Postcolonial Studies, Masculinity Studies, National Cinemas, Women's Rights, Gender and Sexuality, Nationalism, Israel/Palestine, Gender, Masculinity, Women, National Identity, Feminism, Whiteness Studies, Postcolonial Feminism, Masculinities, Postcolonial Theory, Critical Race Theory and Whiteness theory, Postfeminism, Girlhood Studies, Constructions of femininity, Cinema, Femininity, Feminist Literary Theory and Gender Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, Zionism, Israel, Women and Culture, Military, Israel and Zionism, Women and Gender Studies, Cinema Studies, Postfeminist Popular Culture, Girlhood, Whiteness, Boycott Movements, Cinema and Television, Critical Military Studies, HIstory of Zionism and Jewish Nationalism, and Postcolonialism
Our Uncommon Ground: Modern Languages and Cultures for the 21st Century, University of Durham, 16-18 April 2018 Literary critics have recently begun to explore the role of water in our lives and cultural imaginations as part of the ‘blue... more
Our Uncommon Ground: Modern Languages and Cultures for the 21st Century, University of Durham, 16-18 April 2018
Literary critics have recently begun to explore the role of water in our lives and cultural imaginations as part of the ‘blue humanities’. There has been little consideration, however, of how our studies of water might draw from existing scholarship on natural resources, found most prominently in the field of petrofiction. In this paper I turn to the work of contemporary Canadian poet Rita Wong, focusing on her 2015 collection Undercurrent, in order to develop ways in which scholarship on water might productively draw from the resources of petrocritics. I will show that this act of critical borrowing allows us to examine the many ‘borrowings’ that form the basis of capitalism’s impact on water, global ecosystems and human bodies, particularly indigenous and women’s bodies, as staged in Wong’s poetry. The paper will highlight the alternative economies proposed by Wong that might form the basis of non-exploitative relationships with nonhuman nature that acknowledge our ecological ‘debts’.
Literary critics have recently begun to explore the role of water in our lives and cultural imaginations as part of the ‘blue humanities’. There has been little consideration, however, of how our studies of water might draw from existing scholarship on natural resources, found most prominently in the field of petrofiction. In this paper I turn to the work of contemporary Canadian poet Rita Wong, focusing on her 2015 collection Undercurrent, in order to develop ways in which scholarship on water might productively draw from the resources of petrocritics. I will show that this act of critical borrowing allows us to examine the many ‘borrowings’ that form the basis of capitalism’s impact on water, global ecosystems and human bodies, particularly indigenous and women’s bodies, as staged in Wong’s poetry. The paper will highlight the alternative economies proposed by Wong that might form the basis of non-exploitative relationships with nonhuman nature that acknowledge our ecological ‘debts’.
Research Interests: Water, Poetry, Water resources, Canadian Literature, Contemporary Literature, and 11 moreEcocriticism, Environmental Justice, Contemporary Poetry, Water Pollution, Environmental Humanities, Hydropolitics, Ecocriticism and Ecofeminism, Water Justice, Environmental Justice, Indigenous Rights, Water Rights, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, and Blue Humanities
Popular Culture and World Politics v. 10, Newcastle University, 23-25 November 2017. In July and August 2014, as Israel engaged in the 51-day assault on the Gaza Strip which it termed ‘Operation Protective Edge’, Anglophone encounters... more
Popular Culture and World Politics v. 10, Newcastle University, 23-25 November 2017.
In July and August 2014, as Israel engaged in the 51-day assault on the Gaza Strip which it termed ‘Operation Protective Edge’, Anglophone encounters with Israeli militarism were primarily mediated not through official pronouncements or news reports but through social media and popular culture. This paper examines representations of Israel and the Israeli military in social media and pop cultural products circulating in the summer of 2014, including IDF selfies, Gal Gadot’s Instagram, BBC2 drama The Honourable Woman, and Israeli ‘dark comedy’ Zero Motivation. Popular culture has often been neglected in research on Israeli and Palestinian politics. As Rebecca Stein and Ted Swedenberg note, the intensity of the conflict, violence of Israeli occupation and ongoing Palestinian struggle have led scholars to focus on more apparently ‘serious’ matters (2005: 1). Yet as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement gains momentum and young American Jews report decreased identification with Israel (Kampeas, 2014), popular culture is an increasingly significant domain in which the state of Israel bids for moral legitimacy and, crucially, political and military support from Europe and the United States. I discuss Israeli state funding for culture, the wider context of culture as a ‘normalising’ force and form of soft power, and earlier representations of Israel consumed widely in Europe and the US. I highlight the figure of the young woman as a recurrent trope in these recent works, and examine her significance for contemporary politics by situating these products in a longer history of Israel’s ‘civil militarism’ (Brownfield-Stein, 2010) and the Israeli state’s conscription of Israeli womanhood into strategies of national self-construction and legitimation.
References
Brownfield-Stein, Chava, ‘Visual Representations of IDF Women Soldiers and ‘”Civil-Militarism” in Israel’, in Gabriel Sheffer and Oren Barak (eds.), Militarism and Israeli Society (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 304–328.
‘Kampeas, Ron, ‘Young Americans Moving Away From Israel Support’, Forward, 6 August 2014. Available from: <http://forward.com/news/breaking-news/203589/young-americans-moving-away-from-israel-support/> [Accessed 7/6/17].
Stein, Rebecca and Ted Swedenberg, Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)
In July and August 2014, as Israel engaged in the 51-day assault on the Gaza Strip which it termed ‘Operation Protective Edge’, Anglophone encounters with Israeli militarism were primarily mediated not through official pronouncements or news reports but through social media and popular culture. This paper examines representations of Israel and the Israeli military in social media and pop cultural products circulating in the summer of 2014, including IDF selfies, Gal Gadot’s Instagram, BBC2 drama The Honourable Woman, and Israeli ‘dark comedy’ Zero Motivation. Popular culture has often been neglected in research on Israeli and Palestinian politics. As Rebecca Stein and Ted Swedenberg note, the intensity of the conflict, violence of Israeli occupation and ongoing Palestinian struggle have led scholars to focus on more apparently ‘serious’ matters (2005: 1). Yet as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement gains momentum and young American Jews report decreased identification with Israel (Kampeas, 2014), popular culture is an increasingly significant domain in which the state of Israel bids for moral legitimacy and, crucially, political and military support from Europe and the United States. I discuss Israeli state funding for culture, the wider context of culture as a ‘normalising’ force and form of soft power, and earlier representations of Israel consumed widely in Europe and the US. I highlight the figure of the young woman as a recurrent trope in these recent works, and examine her significance for contemporary politics by situating these products in a longer history of Israel’s ‘civil militarism’ (Brownfield-Stein, 2010) and the Israeli state’s conscription of Israeli womanhood into strategies of national self-construction and legitimation.
References
Brownfield-Stein, Chava, ‘Visual Representations of IDF Women Soldiers and ‘”Civil-Militarism” in Israel’, in Gabriel Sheffer and Oren Barak (eds.), Militarism and Israeli Society (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 304–328.
‘Kampeas, Ron, ‘Young Americans Moving Away From Israel Support’, Forward, 6 August 2014. Available from: <http://forward.com/news/breaking-news/203589/young-americans-moving-away-from-israel-support/> [Accessed 7/6/17].
Stein, Rebecca and Ted Swedenberg, Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Film Studies, Television Studies, Comedy, Israel Studies, and 26 morePopular Culture, Visual Culture, Gender and Sexuality, Security Studies, Nationalism, Israel/Palestine, American Foreign Policy, Gender, Social Media, National Identity, Israeli Politics, Civil-military relations, Television Drama, Zionism, Television, Israel and Zionism, Palestinian Politics, World Politics, British Television, Arts Funding, Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Boycott Movements, Gender and Nationalism, Palestine studies, Instagram, and Selfies
Fast Forward: Women’s Writing in the 21st Century, Sheffield Hallam University, Sept. 2017. In the year 2000, chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer coined the term ‘Anthropocene’. Crutzen and Stoermer intended the term to... more
Fast Forward: Women’s Writing in the 21st Century, Sheffield Hallam University, Sept. 2017.
In the year 2000, chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer coined the term ‘Anthropocene’. Crutzen and Stoermer intended the term to capture the way in which, they argued, human activities have become the determining geological force of the present era. The term ‘Anthropocene’ has proven highly generative within twenty-first century literary criticism, taken up by scholars seeking to theorise the ways in which cultural texts have been complicit in, or offered resistance to, dominant modes of instrumentalising, extracting and exhausting nonhuman nature. One of the major ways in which the pervasiveness of our present ecological crisis is articulated in political and journalistic contexts is through the impact of human actions on the world’s water supply. Pundits speak of ‘water wars’ as sources become dry or contaminated, although Flint and Standing Rock show that access to clean water is already wielded as a form of violence by white elites. Rarely, however, have literary critics turned their attention to world water crisis. In this paper I focus on Canadian poet Rita Wong’s 2015 collection Undercurrent, which takes water as its explicit subject. I examine the representational strategies used by Wong to make harm to water visible, delineating a series of key images (the permeability of human bodily membranes; the water cycle; hormonal disruption) which I analyse using queer and ecofeminist theory. I argue that Wong’s text highlights aspects of ecological harm neglected in the Anthropocene debates, but foregrounded in Jason Moore’s work on the ‘Capitalocene’: the uneven responsibility for the state of our water, and the extent to which ecological crisis derives from neoliberal economic policy.
In the year 2000, chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer coined the term ‘Anthropocene’. Crutzen and Stoermer intended the term to capture the way in which, they argued, human activities have become the determining geological force of the present era. The term ‘Anthropocene’ has proven highly generative within twenty-first century literary criticism, taken up by scholars seeking to theorise the ways in which cultural texts have been complicit in, or offered resistance to, dominant modes of instrumentalising, extracting and exhausting nonhuman nature. One of the major ways in which the pervasiveness of our present ecological crisis is articulated in political and journalistic contexts is through the impact of human actions on the world’s water supply. Pundits speak of ‘water wars’ as sources become dry or contaminated, although Flint and Standing Rock show that access to clean water is already wielded as a form of violence by white elites. Rarely, however, have literary critics turned their attention to world water crisis. In this paper I focus on Canadian poet Rita Wong’s 2015 collection Undercurrent, which takes water as its explicit subject. I examine the representational strategies used by Wong to make harm to water visible, delineating a series of key images (the permeability of human bodily membranes; the water cycle; hormonal disruption) which I analyse using queer and ecofeminist theory. I argue that Wong’s text highlights aspects of ecological harm neglected in the Anthropocene debates, but foregrounded in Jason Moore’s work on the ‘Capitalocene’: the uneven responsibility for the state of our water, and the extent to which ecological crisis derives from neoliberal economic policy.
Research Interests: Climate Change, Water, Women's writing, Queer Theory, Poetry, and 17 moreLiterary Criticism, Water resources, Canadian Literature, Ecofeminism, Contemporary Literature, Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, Canadian poetry, Twenty-first Century Literature, Environmental Literature, Hydropolitics, Queer Ecology, Anthropocene, Water Rights, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Ecopoetry & Poetics, and Capitalocene
World-Ecology, World-Culture, World-Economy: Crisis, Slump, Revolution?, University of Durham, July 2016. 'Making the desert bloom' was notoriously an ambition of the early Israeli state, strongly associated with Israel's first... more
World-Ecology, World-Culture, World-Economy: Crisis, Slump, Revolution?, University of Durham, July 2016.
'Making the desert bloom' was notoriously an ambition of the early Israeli state, strongly associated with Israel's first president and Zionist figurehead David Ben-Gurion. Reshaping Israel's environment through drastically altering the country's hydrological landscape served to symbolically inscribe Israeli ownership into the land, while increasing the country's economic potential (notably agriculture, but also supplying coastal cities). This practice demonstrated the new state's technological prowess on a global stage, aligning Israel with the Euro-American world through showing its shared adherence to dominant ideologies of mastering nature. American and European experts participated in 'modernising' Israel's hydroscape as part of a wider global circulation of American-led discourses of development in the mid-twentieth century (Linton 2010). Today it may seem as if water management expertise flows in the opposite direction, as Israeli politicians proclaim that the country's desalination technologies will end persistent droughts in California and South Africa. 'Bluetech' is an increasing Israeli export, with the country seeking to fashion itself as - in the oft-repeated phrase - 'the Silicon Valley of water technology'. Ben-Gurion's nation-building rhetoric is repurposed in Israeli government promotional material to serve Israel's neoliberalising economy, as the country bids for membership of the world system's core. Israel's key export until now has been military expertise and technology (Graham 2010). While water tech may seem a much less problematic export, apparently aiding global responses to looming scarcity, these domains are, as I discuss, not as far apart as they may at first appear. Drawing on disciplines including political ecology, science and technology studies and anthropology, this paper examines the ways in which contemporary local and global discourses about water and economics are registered in Israeli and Palestinian literatures, specifically what I call 'hydrofictions'. It explores the role of Israeli and Palestinian literature in reproducing or resisting unequal power relations brought about through Israeli control and militarisation of water supply. Crucially, it argues for the central role of Israel/Palestine in understanding the power dynamics, politics and cultural impact of global water crisis.
'Making the desert bloom' was notoriously an ambition of the early Israeli state, strongly associated with Israel's first president and Zionist figurehead David Ben-Gurion. Reshaping Israel's environment through drastically altering the country's hydrological landscape served to symbolically inscribe Israeli ownership into the land, while increasing the country's economic potential (notably agriculture, but also supplying coastal cities). This practice demonstrated the new state's technological prowess on a global stage, aligning Israel with the Euro-American world through showing its shared adherence to dominant ideologies of mastering nature. American and European experts participated in 'modernising' Israel's hydroscape as part of a wider global circulation of American-led discourses of development in the mid-twentieth century (Linton 2010). Today it may seem as if water management expertise flows in the opposite direction, as Israeli politicians proclaim that the country's desalination technologies will end persistent droughts in California and South Africa. 'Bluetech' is an increasing Israeli export, with the country seeking to fashion itself as - in the oft-repeated phrase - 'the Silicon Valley of water technology'. Ben-Gurion's nation-building rhetoric is repurposed in Israeli government promotional material to serve Israel's neoliberalising economy, as the country bids for membership of the world system's core. Israel's key export until now has been military expertise and technology (Graham 2010). While water tech may seem a much less problematic export, apparently aiding global responses to looming scarcity, these domains are, as I discuss, not as far apart as they may at first appear. Drawing on disciplines including political ecology, science and technology studies and anthropology, this paper examines the ways in which contemporary local and global discourses about water and economics are registered in Israeli and Palestinian literatures, specifically what I call 'hydrofictions'. It explores the role of Israeli and Palestinian literature in reproducing or resisting unequal power relations brought about through Israeli control and militarisation of water supply. Crucially, it argues for the central role of Israel/Palestine in understanding the power dynamics, politics and cultural impact of global water crisis.
Research Interests: Cultural Geography, World Literatures, Comparative Literature, Hebrew Literature, Water, and 17 moreIsrael Studies, Postcolonial Studies, World Systems Analysis, Water resources, Nationalism, Israel/Palestine, Palestine, Palestinian Literature, STS (Anthropology), Postcolonial Literature, Environmental Humanities, Israeli Literature, Israel and Zionism, Hydropolitics, Palestinian Studies, Geohumanities, and Postcolonial Ecocriticism
Part of the panel 'Tsunamis, Megadams and Water Wars: Reframing Hydropolitical Disaster', presented with Will Wright and Christine Gilmore of the White Rose Hydropolitics Network at Reframing Disaster, University of Leeds, Nov. 2014.... more
Part of the panel 'Tsunamis, Megadams and Water Wars: Reframing Hydropolitical Disaster', presented with Will Wright and Christine Gilmore of the White Rose Hydropolitics Network at Reframing Disaster, University of Leeds, Nov. 2014.
The first paper, by Hannah Boast, provides an alternative perspective on perhaps the most well-known hydropolitical concept, ‘water wars’. In ‘Water Wars and Everyday Disaster in Palestinian Literature and Film’, Boast explores the representation of water in a number of recent Palestinian texts in order to put forward a sceptical argument about the likelihood of future international conflicts over water, adding a rarely heard cultural perspective to existing work by international development scholars Tony Allen (2012), Jan Selby (2004) and Mark Zeitoun (2008). The paper demonstrates that water wars are unlikely to have taken place, or to arise, and argues that the threatened spectacular violence of war obscures the daily and banal acts of ‘slow violence’ affecting Palestinian and Israeli Arab access to water, which create the sustained and much less visible disaster of water shortages and aquifer contamination in these communities. From bureaucratic and legal obstacles created by the Israeli state, to individual sabotage by settlers, to the focus of the paper, power struggles within Palestinian communities that are mediated through control of water resources, these acts are neglected in the abstract ‘water wars’ discourse, but form a central part of Palestinian experiences of water crisis. This paper asks how formal and representational strategies of fiction can highlight aspects of disaster that are absent from geopolitical debates, and, crucially, how these can avoid flattening out difference within Palestinian communities and experiences.
The first paper, by Hannah Boast, provides an alternative perspective on perhaps the most well-known hydropolitical concept, ‘water wars’. In ‘Water Wars and Everyday Disaster in Palestinian Literature and Film’, Boast explores the representation of water in a number of recent Palestinian texts in order to put forward a sceptical argument about the likelihood of future international conflicts over water, adding a rarely heard cultural perspective to existing work by international development scholars Tony Allen (2012), Jan Selby (2004) and Mark Zeitoun (2008). The paper demonstrates that water wars are unlikely to have taken place, or to arise, and argues that the threatened spectacular violence of war obscures the daily and banal acts of ‘slow violence’ affecting Palestinian and Israeli Arab access to water, which create the sustained and much less visible disaster of water shortages and aquifer contamination in these communities. From bureaucratic and legal obstacles created by the Israeli state, to individual sabotage by settlers, to the focus of the paper, power struggles within Palestinian communities that are mediated through control of water resources, these acts are neglected in the abstract ‘water wars’ discourse, but form a central part of Palestinian experiences of water crisis. This paper asks how formal and representational strategies of fiction can highlight aspects of disaster that are absent from geopolitical debates, and, crucially, how these can avoid flattening out difference within Palestinian communities and experiences.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
"The sea has been largely absent from accounts of the relationship between Israelis and their environment, marginalised in the mainstream Zionist narrative of renewing the land of Israel (Hever 2012). Since the early 1980s, however,... more
"The sea has been largely absent from accounts of the relationship between Israelis and their environment, marginalised in the mainstream Zionist narrative of renewing the land of Israel
(Hever 2012). Since the early 1980s, however, there has been an increasing focus on Israel’s coastal location, as ‘Mediterraneanism’ - Yam Tikhoniut in Hebrew - has emerged as a popular theory of Israeli identity (Nocke 2009). Still, while scholars of cultural studies, politics and economics have
written extensively about Mediterraneanism, there has been little attention paid so far to its manifestations in literature. This paper explores the place of the Mediterranean and Mediterraneanism in Israeli author Amos Oz’s novel 'The Same Sea' (2001), arguing that the novel depicts a tension and transition between two forms
of Israeli identity through its use of coastal settings. I demonstrate that, for Oz, the material and metaphorical connective possibilities of the sea provide a means through which he imagines Israel’s social, political and economic futures. At the same time, I show that Oz’s apparent sensitivity to the
Mediterranean’s materiality highlights ambivalences within the Mediterranean idea. Oz’s focus on water’s smoothness and flow, the foundation of a peaceful ‘Mare Nostrum’, elides the reality of the Mediterranean as a space of blockages, disruptions and toxicity, when viewed alternatively as the scene for migrant journeys, the Mavi Marmara killings, and the disposal site for desalination by-products (Chambers 2010; Iovino 2013). This paper shows that Mediterraneanism, ostensibly an Israeli reengagement with place, can also act as a kind of displacement, negating Israel’s need to deal with the complex entanglements of politics and ecology in the Mediterranean Sea."
(Hever 2012). Since the early 1980s, however, there has been an increasing focus on Israel’s coastal location, as ‘Mediterraneanism’ - Yam Tikhoniut in Hebrew - has emerged as a popular theory of Israeli identity (Nocke 2009). Still, while scholars of cultural studies, politics and economics have
written extensively about Mediterraneanism, there has been little attention paid so far to its manifestations in literature. This paper explores the place of the Mediterranean and Mediterraneanism in Israeli author Amos Oz’s novel 'The Same Sea' (2001), arguing that the novel depicts a tension and transition between two forms
of Israeli identity through its use of coastal settings. I demonstrate that, for Oz, the material and metaphorical connective possibilities of the sea provide a means through which he imagines Israel’s social, political and economic futures. At the same time, I show that Oz’s apparent sensitivity to the
Mediterranean’s materiality highlights ambivalences within the Mediterranean idea. Oz’s focus on water’s smoothness and flow, the foundation of a peaceful ‘Mare Nostrum’, elides the reality of the Mediterranean as a space of blockages, disruptions and toxicity, when viewed alternatively as the scene for migrant journeys, the Mavi Marmara killings, and the disposal site for desalination by-products (Chambers 2010; Iovino 2013). This paper shows that Mediterraneanism, ostensibly an Israeli reengagement with place, can also act as a kind of displacement, negating Israel’s need to deal with the complex entanglements of politics and ecology in the Mediterranean Sea."
Research Interests: Tourism Studies, Water, Israel Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Israel/Palestine, and 9 moreMediterranean Studies, Ecocriticism, Environmental Sustainability, Israeli Literature, Israel and Zionism, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Mavi Marmara, Amos Oz, and Ecology and Environment In the Heritage of Israel
"The ‘geobody’ (Winichakul 1994) of Israel/Palestine is defined in terms of its boundedness by water, sited ‘between the river and the sea’ or ‘from the river to the sea’ depending on one’s national affiliation. This is markedly clear in... more
"The ‘geobody’ (Winichakul 1994) of Israel/Palestine is defined in terms of its boundedness by water, sited ‘between the river and the sea’ or ‘from the river to the sea’ depending on one’s national affiliation. This is markedly clear in the Arabic form of the latter slogan, which translates more directly as ‘between water and water’. However, the watery margins so central to picturing Israel/Palestine remain marginalised within Israel/Palestine studies, which has tended to face inward and focus on the land, including symbols of national ‘rootedness’ such as the Palestinian olive tree.
In this paper I take my cue from a movement seawards in ecocriticism and cultural geography which often comes under the title of ‘maritime studies’ (DeLoughrey 2007, Peters 2010), and attempt a reorientation of Israeli and Palestinian literary studies towards the Mediterranean Sea, an effort begun from a broader cultural perspective by Nocke (2010). My theme will be narratives of the sea journey in Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s novel The Ship (1985), the poems of Yehuda Amichai, and the contemporary Palestinian activist event of the Gaza Freedom flotilla.
In particular, I will examine the interactions between representations of the apparently enclosed ship and human body at sea, and notions of the nation-state as a ‘container’ (Balibar 1990, Giddens 1987). This paper argues that, in addition to serving as a medium through which the land of Israel/Palestine can be reached or departed, the Mediterranean Sea itself is a heterotopic space, substance, and ‘thing’ (Peters 2010, drawing on Bennett 2001) through which Israeli and Palestinian identities are imagined and negotiated."
In this paper I take my cue from a movement seawards in ecocriticism and cultural geography which often comes under the title of ‘maritime studies’ (DeLoughrey 2007, Peters 2010), and attempt a reorientation of Israeli and Palestinian literary studies towards the Mediterranean Sea, an effort begun from a broader cultural perspective by Nocke (2010). My theme will be narratives of the sea journey in Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s novel The Ship (1985), the poems of Yehuda Amichai, and the contemporary Palestinian activist event of the Gaza Freedom flotilla.
In particular, I will examine the interactions between representations of the apparently enclosed ship and human body at sea, and notions of the nation-state as a ‘container’ (Balibar 1990, Giddens 1987). This paper argues that, in addition to serving as a medium through which the land of Israel/Palestine can be reached or departed, the Mediterranean Sea itself is a heterotopic space, substance, and ‘thing’ (Peters 2010, drawing on Bennett 2001) through which Israeli and Palestinian identities are imagined and negotiated."
Research Interests:
"Control of water resources in Israel/Palestine has been a major cause of conflict, and the River Jordan, as water source and national border, has focused the attention of political scholars (Selby 2004, Allen 2002). While the Jordan's... more
"Control of water resources in Israel/Palestine has been a major cause of conflict, and the River Jordan, as water source and national border, has focused the attention of political scholars (Selby 2004, Allen 2002). While the Jordan's waters have been the subject of intensive political-ecological discussion, there has been little consideration of their social and cultural significance, in spite of a growing turn elsewhere towards the meanings of water (Strang 2004; Hahn, Cless and Soentgen 2012).
In response, this paper considers ways in which Israeli and Palestinian identities have been constituted in relation to the River Jordan (with reference to Havrelock's work on the Jordan as a border, 2011). Drawing on Bauman's comments on the properties of liquids (2001), I argue that the capacity of the hydrological cycle to represent time and change is central to the value of the Jordan as a means to imagine Israeli and Palestinian communities, and also to assert ownership of the river. I discuss a number of striking literary examples of engagements between Israelis and Palestinians and the waters of the Jordan, exploring the sensory and material entanglement involved in swimming in the river (Smilansky 1910), as well as the relationship between the lack of circulation of today's ecologically degraded Jordan and the restricted mobility of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories (Barghouti 2004).
This paper shows that the Israel/Palestine struggle over access rights to the Jordan has a neglected dimension, in that it also involves a conflict between national identities that is played out through, and in, the medium of the water."
In response, this paper considers ways in which Israeli and Palestinian identities have been constituted in relation to the River Jordan (with reference to Havrelock's work on the Jordan as a border, 2011). Drawing on Bauman's comments on the properties of liquids (2001), I argue that the capacity of the hydrological cycle to represent time and change is central to the value of the Jordan as a means to imagine Israeli and Palestinian communities, and also to assert ownership of the river. I discuss a number of striking literary examples of engagements between Israelis and Palestinians and the waters of the Jordan, exploring the sensory and material entanglement involved in swimming in the river (Smilansky 1910), as well as the relationship between the lack of circulation of today's ecologically degraded Jordan and the restricted mobility of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories (Barghouti 2004).
This paper shows that the Israel/Palestine struggle over access rights to the Jordan has a neglected dimension, in that it also involves a conflict between national identities that is played out through, and in, the medium of the water."
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Examines the history of Israeli and Palestinian hydropolitics; water and ecocriticism; water in Israeli and Palestinian literature and literary criticism. Discusses authors including Evelyn Accad, Sami 'Amr, Amos Oz, Dahlia Ravokovitch,... more
Examines the history of Israeli and Palestinian hydropolitics; water and ecocriticism; water in Israeli and Palestinian literature and literary criticism. Discusses authors including Evelyn Accad, Sami 'Amr, Amos Oz, Dahlia Ravokovitch, Meir Shalev.
Research Interests:
Research Interests: Religion, Sociology, Cultural Geography, Historical Geography, Archaeology, and 57 moreComparative Literature, Anthropology, Visual Studies, English Literature, Tourism Studies, Art History, Ottoman History, Peace and Conflict Studies, Medieval Literature, Romanticism, Arabic Literature, Theology, Architecture, Medieval History, Early Modern History, Middle East Studies, Nineteenth Century Studies, Literature, Middle East History, Israel Studies, Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Renaissance Studies, Space and Place, Visual Culture, Literary Criticism, Hebrew Bible, Urban Planning, Eighteenth Century History, Politics, Israel/Palestine, Biblical Studies, Colonialism, Palestine, Mediterranean Studies, Early Modern Europe, Ottoman Studies, History Of The Bible/Biblical Canon, Ottoman Empire, Early Modern Literature, Palestinian Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Middle East Politics, Israeli Literature, Literary Approaches to Biblical Studies, Phenomenology of Space and Place, Visual Arts, Zionism, Israel, Israel and Zionism, Middle East, Jerusalem, Religious Studies, Arab-Israeli conflict, Imperialism, Palestinian Studies, and Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
Research Interests: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Cultural Geography, Anthropology, Political Economy, and 29 moreArt History, Development Studies, Globalization, Climate Change, Natural Resources, Postcolonial Studies, World Systems Analysis, Political Ecology, Disaster Studies, Animal Studies, Critical Animal Studies, Literary Criticism, Human-Environment Relations, Sustainable Development, Colonialism, Literary Theory, Resistance (Social), Capitalism, Ecology, Neoliberalism, Ecocriticism, Environmental Sustainability, Environmental Humanities, Environmentalism, Decolonisation, Natural Disasters, Food Studies, New Materialism, and Postcolonial Ecocriticism
Research Interests: Religion, Geography, Cultural Geography, Anthropology, Development Studies, and 15 moreMiddle East Studies, Water, Postcolonial Studies, Literary Criticism, Ritual, Water resources, Politics, Israel/Palestine, Migration Studies, Big Dams, Ecocriticism, Environmental Sustainability, New Materialism, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, and Flood Mangement
"Call for Papers, deadline 13th September "Water sustains life, but how might it also be said to sustain communities? Social and cultural engagements with water have become a rapidly expanding research area over recent years, a... more
"Call for Papers, deadline 13th September
"Water sustains life, but how might it also be said to sustain communities? Social and cultural engagements with water have become a rapidly expanding research area over recent years, a development which has challenged and complicated the previously dominant technical–managerial view of water as a ‘natural resource’. There is a growing realisation that ecologically-responsible interactions with water can only come about through an understanding of how people experience, use and ‘think with’ water as a particular type of substance that lies somewhere between nature and culture.
Veronica Strang proposes that: ‘Water’s diversity is [...] a key to its meanings’ (2005: 98). Water comes in many forms: it can be salty, fresh, flowing, frozen, or gaseous; it can be ‘blue’ or ‘green’ (Falkenmark 1997), grey, or ‘virtual’ (Allen 2011). Water might be understood as a materialisation of structures of social power (Swyngedouw 2004), a substance through whose movements we can trace histories of colonialism, underdevelopment and the flow of capital. It can be a space of leisure, sport, or hedonism, or a site of danger, the origin of disasters such as tsunamis or droughts. Perhaps crucially, thinking about water is inseparable from thinking about its opposite, land.
This workshop takes water’s various forms as a provocation and invitation for postgraduates to present similarly diverse critical perspectives on water’s social meanings. It offers a unique opportunity for constructive interdisciplinary conversations on this emerging and vital subject.
Topics to consider might include, but are not limited to:
• Water privatisation
• Water on film
• Water in ecocriticism and environmental studies
• Gendered engagements with water
• Water in religion, performance and ritual
• Waterscapes – the sea, rivers, coastlines, marshes
• Disasters and reconstruction
• Embodiment, memory and affect
The day will feature a keynote speech by Dr Kimberley Peters, Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, and will conclude with a roundtable discussion led by Professor Graham Huggan of the School of English at the University of Leeds.
This event is hosted by the White Rose Research Studentship Network on Hydropolitics: Community, Environment and Conflict in an Unevenly Developed World. It has been generously supported by the University of York Humanities Research Centre.
Please see the blog for more information: http://socialwater.wordpress.com/"
"Water sustains life, but how might it also be said to sustain communities? Social and cultural engagements with water have become a rapidly expanding research area over recent years, a development which has challenged and complicated the previously dominant technical–managerial view of water as a ‘natural resource’. There is a growing realisation that ecologically-responsible interactions with water can only come about through an understanding of how people experience, use and ‘think with’ water as a particular type of substance that lies somewhere between nature and culture.
Veronica Strang proposes that: ‘Water’s diversity is [...] a key to its meanings’ (2005: 98). Water comes in many forms: it can be salty, fresh, flowing, frozen, or gaseous; it can be ‘blue’ or ‘green’ (Falkenmark 1997), grey, or ‘virtual’ (Allen 2011). Water might be understood as a materialisation of structures of social power (Swyngedouw 2004), a substance through whose movements we can trace histories of colonialism, underdevelopment and the flow of capital. It can be a space of leisure, sport, or hedonism, or a site of danger, the origin of disasters such as tsunamis or droughts. Perhaps crucially, thinking about water is inseparable from thinking about its opposite, land.
This workshop takes water’s various forms as a provocation and invitation for postgraduates to present similarly diverse critical perspectives on water’s social meanings. It offers a unique opportunity for constructive interdisciplinary conversations on this emerging and vital subject.
Topics to consider might include, but are not limited to:
• Water privatisation
• Water on film
• Water in ecocriticism and environmental studies
• Gendered engagements with water
• Water in religion, performance and ritual
• Waterscapes – the sea, rivers, coastlines, marshes
• Disasters and reconstruction
• Embodiment, memory and affect
The day will feature a keynote speech by Dr Kimberley Peters, Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, and will conclude with a roundtable discussion led by Professor Graham Huggan of the School of English at the University of Leeds.
This event is hosted by the White Rose Research Studentship Network on Hydropolitics: Community, Environment and Conflict in an Unevenly Developed World. It has been generously supported by the University of York Humanities Research Centre.
Please see the blog for more information: http://socialwater.wordpress.com/"
Research Interests:
"Social Water: an Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Workshop 25th October 2013, University of York Call for Papers – deadline 13th September Water sustains life, but how might it also be said to sustain communities? Social and... more
"Social Water: an Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Workshop
25th October 2013, University of York
Call for Papers – deadline 13th September
Water sustains life, but how might it also be said to sustain communities? Social and cultural engagements with water have become a rapidly expanding research area, a development which has challenged and complicated the previously dominant technical–managerial view of water as a ‘natural resource’. There is a growing realisation that ecologically-responsible interactions with water can only come about through an understanding of how people experience, use and ‘think with’ water as a particular type of substance that lies somewhere between nature and culture.
Veronica Strang proposes that: ‘Water’s diversity is [...] a key to its meanings’ (2005: 98). Water comes in many forms: it can be salty, fresh, flowing, frozen, or gaseous; it can be ‘blue’ or ‘green’ (Falkenmark 1997), grey, or ‘virtual’ (Allen 2011). Water might be understood as a materialisation of structures of social power (Swyngedouw 2004), a substance through whose movements we can trace histories of colonialism, underdevelopment and the flow of capital. It can be a space of leisure, sport, or hedonism, or a site of danger, the origin of disasters such as tsunamis or droughts. Perhaps crucially, thinking about water is inseparable from thinking about its opposite, land.
This workshop takes water’s various forms as a provocation and invitation for postgraduates to present similarly diverse critical perspectives on water’s social meanings. It offers a unique opportunity for constructive interdisciplinary conversations on this emerging and vital subject.
Topics to consider might include, but are not limited to:
Water privatisation
Water on film
Water in ecocriticism and environmental studies
Gendered engagements with water
Water in religion, performance and ritual
Waterscapes – the sea, rivers, coastlines, marshes
Disasters and reconstruction
Embodiment, memory and affect
The day will feature a keynote speech by Dr Kimberley Peters, Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, and will conclude with a roundtable discussion led by Professor Graham Huggan of the School of English at the University of Leeds.
This event is hosted by the White Rose Research Studentship Network on Hydropolitics: Community, Environment and Conflict in an Unevenly Developed World. It has been generously supported by the University of York Humanities Research Centre."
25th October 2013, University of York
Call for Papers – deadline 13th September
Water sustains life, but how might it also be said to sustain communities? Social and cultural engagements with water have become a rapidly expanding research area, a development which has challenged and complicated the previously dominant technical–managerial view of water as a ‘natural resource’. There is a growing realisation that ecologically-responsible interactions with water can only come about through an understanding of how people experience, use and ‘think with’ water as a particular type of substance that lies somewhere between nature and culture.
Veronica Strang proposes that: ‘Water’s diversity is [...] a key to its meanings’ (2005: 98). Water comes in many forms: it can be salty, fresh, flowing, frozen, or gaseous; it can be ‘blue’ or ‘green’ (Falkenmark 1997), grey, or ‘virtual’ (Allen 2011). Water might be understood as a materialisation of structures of social power (Swyngedouw 2004), a substance through whose movements we can trace histories of colonialism, underdevelopment and the flow of capital. It can be a space of leisure, sport, or hedonism, or a site of danger, the origin of disasters such as tsunamis or droughts. Perhaps crucially, thinking about water is inseparable from thinking about its opposite, land.
This workshop takes water’s various forms as a provocation and invitation for postgraduates to present similarly diverse critical perspectives on water’s social meanings. It offers a unique opportunity for constructive interdisciplinary conversations on this emerging and vital subject.
Topics to consider might include, but are not limited to:
Water privatisation
Water on film
Water in ecocriticism and environmental studies
Gendered engagements with water
Water in religion, performance and ritual
Waterscapes – the sea, rivers, coastlines, marshes
Disasters and reconstruction
Embodiment, memory and affect
The day will feature a keynote speech by Dr Kimberley Peters, Lecturer in Human Geography at Aberystwyth University, and will conclude with a roundtable discussion led by Professor Graham Huggan of the School of English at the University of Leeds.
This event is hosted by the White Rose Research Studentship Network on Hydropolitics: Community, Environment and Conflict in an Unevenly Developed World. It has been generously supported by the University of York Humanities Research Centre."
Research Interests:
Taught in School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Autumn 2022. This Stage 3 module explores key debates in feminist theory from 1975 to the present. Students will gain a grounding in the core concepts of 'gender',... more
Taught in School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Autumn 2022. This Stage 3 module explores key debates in feminist theory from 1975 to the present. Students will gain a grounding in the core concepts of 'gender', 'sex', 'sexuality' and 'feminism', and in the historical themes that shape contemporary feminist thought. Topics may include Marxist feminism, ecofeminism, Black feminism and postfeminism. The module will also cover key topics in queer theory that may include homonationalism, homonormativity, queer temporalities and queer ecology. The module is theory-led and includes work drawn from visual culture and media studies as well as literary studies.
Taught in School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Spring 2023. This Stage 3 module introduces students to debates on environmental politics in contemporary literature and culture. It focuses on the extraction,... more
Taught in School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Spring 2023.
This Stage 3 module introduces students to debates on environmental politics in contemporary literature and culture. It focuses on the extraction, consumption and exhaustion of natural resources in the context of the climate crisis. The module will be structured around three key topics that will vary each year. These may include water, oil, food, animals, energy, plantations, metals, minerals, and waste. The module will cover a range of forms, potentially including novels, drama, poetry, short stories, graphic novels, and film. Students will learn about the different ways in which contemporary authors and creatives have represented resource extraction and use, and the social, political, economic and environmental effects of these processes. Module discussions will be grounded in current theoretical debates in the environmental humanities, including scholarship from petrocriticism, the energy humanities, and the blue humanities. The module will be interdisciplinary, and students will also read work in cultural geography, political ecology, science and technology studies, and anthropology.
This Stage 3 module introduces students to debates on environmental politics in contemporary literature and culture. It focuses on the extraction, consumption and exhaustion of natural resources in the context of the climate crisis. The module will be structured around three key topics that will vary each year. These may include water, oil, food, animals, energy, plantations, metals, minerals, and waste. The module will cover a range of forms, potentially including novels, drama, poetry, short stories, graphic novels, and film. Students will learn about the different ways in which contemporary authors and creatives have represented resource extraction and use, and the social, political, economic and environmental effects of these processes. Module discussions will be grounded in current theoretical debates in the environmental humanities, including scholarship from petrocriticism, the energy humanities, and the blue humanities. The module will be interdisciplinary, and students will also read work in cultural geography, political ecology, science and technology studies, and anthropology.
Updated syllabus for third-year module Feminist Killjoys: Theories of Gender and Sexuality taught at University of Birmingham 2018-2019.
Research Interests:
Syllabus for third-year module on feminist and queer theory. Running for the first time in the Department of English at the University of Birmingham in Autumn 2017. Thanks to the many people who offered suggestions and feedback. And, of... more
Syllabus for third-year module on feminist and queer theory. Running for the first time in the Department of English at the University of Birmingham in Autumn 2017. Thanks to the many people who offered suggestions and feedback. And, of course, thanks to Sara Ahmed for the title!
Research Interests:
Part of a panel I organised on 'The Spectacle of Extinction' for ASLE-UKI September 2022. Two other speakers, Kári Driscoll and Deborah Schrijvers.
Research Interests:
Gardens in the Gorse: Rural Britain’s Modernist Cultures, University of Newcastle, 15 Oct 2022 Sarah Hall’s novel Haweswater addresses the history of Mardale Green, a small Lake District farming village that was drowned in the 1930s... more
Gardens in the Gorse: Rural Britain’s Modernist Cultures, University of Newcastle, 15 Oct 2022
Sarah Hall’s novel Haweswater addresses the history of Mardale Green, a small Lake District farming village that was drowned in the 1930s for the construction of the Haweswater Reservoir. Hall’s novel is ostensibly a nostalgic story of forbidden rural romance between a farmer’s daughter and a water board employee come to inform the villagers of their fate. Yet as Dominic Head notes (2020), Hall renews the traditional genre of rural writing by integrating contemporary concerns. In this paper, I argue that Haweswater offers a nuanced portrait of the impacts of hydromodernist (Swyngedouw 2015) projects on British rural communities. Hall connects the fate of the villagers and dam workers to the sacrifice of working-class British soldiers in the First and Second World Wars, and hints, through references to the shifting fortunes of the British Empire, to the impacts of colonial hydromodernism elsewhere. The publication date of Hall’s novel is significant to my argument. Published in 2002, Haweswater followed the backlash against megadams of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as Britain’s first post-privatization drought, in 1995, during what was then one of the hottest summers on record. Through returning to the 1930s, Haweswater offers a pointed critique of a lack of democratic participation in water management in the 1990s, that resonates more strongly than ever in our parched present.
Sarah Hall’s novel Haweswater addresses the history of Mardale Green, a small Lake District farming village that was drowned in the 1930s for the construction of the Haweswater Reservoir. Hall’s novel is ostensibly a nostalgic story of forbidden rural romance between a farmer’s daughter and a water board employee come to inform the villagers of their fate. Yet as Dominic Head notes (2020), Hall renews the traditional genre of rural writing by integrating contemporary concerns. In this paper, I argue that Haweswater offers a nuanced portrait of the impacts of hydromodernist (Swyngedouw 2015) projects on British rural communities. Hall connects the fate of the villagers and dam workers to the sacrifice of working-class British soldiers in the First and Second World Wars, and hints, through references to the shifting fortunes of the British Empire, to the impacts of colonial hydromodernism elsewhere. The publication date of Hall’s novel is significant to my argument. Published in 2002, Haweswater followed the backlash against megadams of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as Britain’s first post-privatization drought, in 1995, during what was then one of the hottest summers on record. Through returning to the 1930s, Haweswater offers a pointed critique of a lack of democratic participation in water management in the 1990s, that resonates more strongly than ever in our parched present.
Research Interests:
Invited lecture, Centre for Water Cultures seminar series, University of Hull, 11 May 2022
Research Interests: Dystopian Literature, Water resources, Israel/Palestine, Palestine, Science Fiction, and 10 moreEnvironmental Politics, Contemporary Literature, Postcolonial Literature, Ecocriticism, Water Pollution, Environmental Humanities, Nature Writing, Palestinian Studies, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Postcolonial Ecocriticism
Interviewed by UCD Earth Institute Manager Caitriona Deverey for Earth Talks, the Earth Institute website.
Research Interests:
Interviewed by Josh Milburn on my work on gay frog memes and far-right environmental politics for Knowing Animals podcast.