Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, “Livability under Siege: Infrastructure’s Everyday Worlds”

This talk draws on long term fieldwork for two book projects, one based in Palestine and the other based in Greece, to make the case for thinking about the strategies people use to mitigate besieging circumstances through questions about infrastructure. The talk begins with stories of “waste siege” in the occupied West Bank to show how waste and its infrastructures become braided into people’s senses of ethics, self, and possibilities for alternative futures. It then crosses the Mediterranean...