Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins.
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, associate professor of anthropology, was interviewed by Melanie Ford Lemus for
American Ethnologist on “the spatial politics and practices of occupation, infrastructure as performative assemblages, shared environments, and their public constitutions.” Discussing concepts outlined in her book,
Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine, Stamatopoulou-Robbins explained the usage of “siege” as a conceptual framework. “The word siege suggests overlap with occupation, partly conceptually but also in showing how there are overlapping, not always perfectly, challenges to Palestinian life that are also siege-like and made possible by occupation but that cannot be reduced to it,” Stamatopoulou-Robbins says. “I was interested in the way that, through infrastructure, [engineers] were on the one hand aiming to build the future, to make the future now, by building the state that is not yet here,” she continues, “and on the other hand deferring the future that they might want.”
Post Date: 07-26-2022