Welcome. I am a cultural anthropologist and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bard College.

My research interests and ethnographic film-making center around the environment, climate change, waste and toxicity, the politics of health, infrastructure, sovereignty, food ethics, photography, property, and platform capitalism.

I have long-term fieldwork experience in Palestine/Israel and Greece.

Featured Works

My first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), won five major book awards:

The Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award in 2020.

The 2020 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title, sponsored by the American Library Association.

The American Anthropological Association Middle East Section Award in 2021.

The American Ethnological Society’s Sharon Stephens Book Prize in 2021.

The Julian Steward Award, sponsored by the Anthropology and Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association.

You can order it from your local bookstore.

About Me

I hold a BA in anthropology and human rights from Columbia University, an Msc in Forced Migration from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University.

I am interested in how that which is destructive–such as waste, climate change, military occupation, industrial disasters, and austerity governance–is also world-making. I try to understand how lives, futures and socialities are remade in relation to the changing material infrastructures with which people live.

In addition to Waste Siege, I have published articles on topics including climate change adaptation, waste infrastructures, temporality, refugee relocation, humanitarianism, and platform-mediated home-sharing. My research and film-making have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Open Society University Network.

I serve on the editorial board of Cultural Anthropology and on the advisory board of Critical AI. I am a member of the Discard Studies Collective based out of New York University. I grew up in New York City while spending long periods each year in Greece. I speak Greek and Arabic and have a working knowledge of French and German.

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Contact

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