Annual Conference: Environment and Climate Change in the Middle East

Annual MESP Conference: Environment and Climate Change in the Middle East, April 12, 2024

April 12, 2024
9 am to 5:30 pm

In the Old Madison Room, Room 3312*
Memorial Union, UW-Madison

Free and Open to the Public

Hear academic experts across a variety of fields present new and cutting-edge work on this important issue.

*Please note that this floor can only be accessed using the elevator/stairs on the east side of the building (where Peet’s coffee is located)

Building Towards Liveable City Spaces with Sabils in Cairo
Tessa Farmer

Drawing on 15 years of ethnographic research, this talk explores the ways that people in Cairo, Egypt are building on the longstanding tradition of charitable water fountains (sabils) to respond to climate change-induced heat extremes. Many aspects of the built form and behavioral patterns that had previously addressed conditions of heat have become unmanageable over the course of the 20th and early 21st century because of shifts in the availability of materials and technology of building design, changing notions of what “good living” looks like, shifts in sensory expectations about thermal comfort, economic structures that shift the temporality and spatiality of labor, increasing urban density and changing land use patterns, and shifting social structures that dictate, for example, the layout of homes and their relationship to other spaces, to name a few. As heat has increased, the built form has shifted, and living patterns have reorganized, Cairenes have drawn on a longstanding tradition of sabils to maintain the livability of their city spaces.

Tessa Farmer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Global Studies Program at University of Virginia. Her first book, Well-Connected: Everyday Water Practices in Cairo (2023), focused on water and wastewater in Cairo, Egypt. She has a second book project underway on charitable water fountains (sabils), and an ongoing research collaboration with Megawra on greywater use and urban farming. Her research has been awarded funding by Fulbright Hayes, Social Science Research Council, PEO, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Virginia.

‘I am a tree in Gulhane Park’: An Istanbul Environmental Movement and its Literary Roots
Kim Fortuny

There is a long tradition of honoring nature in Turkish literature. This talk will focus on the topic of nature in two writers, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (1901-1962) and Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963), whose lives spanned the transformation from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic. These writers can be traced to a short-lived environmental protest movement with long-term consequences, which took place some fifty years after their deaths. In 2013 people took to the streets in Istanbul when the government revealed plans to turn a relatively small, but central and historically significant public green space, Gezi Park, into a shopping mall. The protests sparked general demonstrations against the ruling party. The three-week movement was violently put down and in many ways signaled the beginning of the end of a decade of relative civic liberty. It was also the beginning of a popular environmental movement. The tradition of invoking nature in Turkish literature, particularly in poetry, informed this aesthetic response to what began as an environmental threat. Facilitated by the fields of Ecocriticism and Ecopoetics this talk will trace some of the features and foci in the writing of Tanpinar and Hikmet that set the stage for and helped give voice to protesting Istanbullus, particularly students. It will also field some of the post-protest ramifications of this environmental movement motivated by literature.

Kim Fortuny is a Professor of English in the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Bogazici University, in Istanbul, Turkey. She is the author of “Animals and the Environment in Turkish Culture: Ecocriticism and Transnational Literature” (I.B. Tauris, 2019) and “American Writers in Istanbul” (Syracuse UP, 2009). Her current interests are in poetry and Ecopoetics.

Intersectional and Equity Perspectives on Climate Change
Leila M. Harris

This presentation will consider some key questions, and research interventions, related to gender, equity and other intersectional perspectives important for considering climate change vulnerability and adaptation in Turkey and the broader Middle East region.

Leila M Harris is Professor of settler origin with the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability and with the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia [on unceded and traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil Waututh) and sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish Coast Salish) peoples]. Her work analyzes a range of governance and political considerations from feminist, equity, and sustainability perspectives—with research focused on water politics, governance, and justice in varied contexts (from Turkey, to Ghana, South Africa, and Canada). Recent projects consider lived experiences and equity concerns related to the uneven implementation of the human right to water, ongoing water governance shifts in varied contexts, as well as social, affective, and political dimensions of the uneven geography of water access, quality, and infrastructures.

What is the political ecology of climate change in the Middle East? Development and adaptation in a region of inequality
Christian Henderson

The Middle East is often depicted as a region that is highly exposed to a changing climate. Hyperbolic newspaper headlines claim that the region is going to become unlivable as a result of rising temperatures and scarce resources. There is a tendency to portray the region’s societies as equally exposed to the effects of a warming climate. This presentation will challenge this perception and argue that the main determinants of the effects of climate change will be social and not natural, at least in the midterm. Rather than a shared reality, the regional pathways will be very different. Wealthier countries of the region are adapting through investments in infrastructure, resource management and logistics. Poorer countries of the region, however, are much more exposed as they face a combination of economic woes, conflict and environmental degradation.

Christian Henderson is assistant professor of International Relations and the Modern Middle East Studies at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies in Leiden University. His research focuses on food systems in the Gulf states and the political ecology of the Middle East. He holds a PhD in Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. His work has been published in Journal of Peasant Studies, Environment and Planning A, Globalizations, and New Political Economy.

Cultivating a Sustainable Sovereignty? Agriculture as a Terrain of Struggle in Northern Palestine
Gabi Kirk

Based on ethnographic and archival research conducted over four years, this paper chronicles changes and challenges in agriculture in Palestine across a century and a half. It examines how Palestinian farmers in villages across the northern Occupied West Bank have used agriculture as a tool of political struggle against encroaching dispossession from both Israeli settler colonialism and structures of global neoliberal capital. Drawing on interdisciplinary subfields in human geography—political ecology, feminist geographies, and geographies of colonialism—this project offers new empirical findings of how settler-colonial dispossession in Palestine has been enacted through programs positioned as environmentally and economically beneficial.

Gabi Kirk is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Analysis at Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, CA. She received her PhD in geography with a designated emphasis in feminist theory and research from University of California, Davis.

A Vector of Acceleration: Energy Infrastructure, Development, and the Environment in Modern Iran
Ciruce A. Movahedi-Lankarani

Between the 1930s and the end of the century, natural gas became Iran’s keystone energy source. Billed as a futuristic energy system for a future world power, over the course of the twentieth century the hydrocarbon resource became a critical avenue by which the potent developmentalist impulses that surged through the country were given expression. Both before and after the 1979 revolution, the ability to build a technologically sophisticated network of pipelines and refineries for the provision of natural gas fuel to Iranians was a powerful tool for state legitimation, one that tied together the top-down politics of modernization with bottom-up feelings of national belonging. Tracing the transformation of natural gas from a waste product into a vital resource consumed across the country, this presentation studies the energy source as a crucial enabler of industrialization, a potent symbol within a highly charged politics of anticolonial resource nationalism, and the crucial means by which Iran became a society organized around high energy use and resource consumption—a story indicative of why and how societies in the Global South came to be intensive consumers of fossil fuel energy and thus gave rise to the Great Acceleration.

Ciruce A. Movahedi-Lankarani is the Farhang Foundation Early Career Chair in Iranian Studies and Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California. Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Social Science Research Council, Ciruce’s work studies technology’s mediating role in the relationship between people and their environments. His current book project examines the connections between anticolonial resource nationalism, industrializing developmentalism, and the natural world in the Global South through the history of Iran’s natural gas infrastructure.

Climate and the Political Ecology of Violence in the Ottoman Middle East
Zozan Pehlivan

Violence towards Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire has been understood by scholars as a clash between Muslims and Christians, perpetuated by Kurdish pastoral nomads against agrarian Armenians. This talk complicates this claim, arguing that it was the struggle to access natural resources in times of environmental stress that underpinned these episodes of violence. Utilizing rich Ottoman and British archival documentary sources, climate, and veterinary science, and ethnographic studies, I propose an alternative explanation of the roots of inter-communal violence in the late Ottoman Empire, challenging existing understandings of the violent breakdown of centuries of interdependency between agrarian and herding communities. By considering the impacts of recurrent late nineteenth-century global climate fluctuations on Ottoman policy-making this talk contributes to ongoing efforts to connect environmental history to the political history of the Middle East and beyond.

Zozan Pehlivan is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and a Mellon Fellow at the Newberry Library, Chicago. She is an environmental historian with a focus on the relationship between environmental stress and the rise of inter-communal violence in the Middle East. Her innovative, interdisciplinary research has received numerous awards, including recognition from the Institute of Historical Research (2011), American Society for Environmental History (2018), and the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (2021).

Designing Thermal Comfort: Hassan Fathy’s “Natural Energy” Architecture
Nancy Reynolds

Heralded internationally as “Egypt’s prophet of appropriate technology,” Hassan Fathy (1900-89) advocated for an architecture based in local materials and vernacular traditions. As part of the twenty-first century focus on anthropogenic climate change, Fathy’s “desert attunement” is often proclaimed as “green prophecy” and mud bricks heralded as a low-carbon-emission construction material that produces buildings with high thermal performance and reduced energy consumption. Using his correspondence, reports, designs, published writings, and built forms, this talk explores Fathy’s “discovery” and commercialization of key vernacular building practices in the Middle East. Primary focus is on Fathy’s changing use of mudbrick vaulting, a technique he learned in Nubia, an area of Egypt’s arid south largely destroyed by dams in the twentieth century. By charting how Fathy mined Nubia to use its residents’ “instinctive” skills for living in hot arid lands in his wider architectural practice, this talk addresses the potential of global climate change solutions to reinscribe colonialism.

Nancy Y. Reynolds is Associate Professor of History and of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research investigates the history of twentieth-century Egypt. Her first book, A City Consumed: Urban Commerce, the Cairo Fire, and the Politics of Decolonization in Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2012) won MESA’s Roger Owen Book Award. She is currently completing a book on the building of the Aswan High Dam. Her work has appeared in edited volumes and journals such as City & Society; International Journal of Middle East Studies; Journal of Women’s History; European Review of History, and Arab Studies Journal. In addition to an ACLS fellowship (2012), her research has recently been supported by a Mellon New Directions Fellowship (2014-23) and a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures (2016-23).

Silence as Testimonial: The Untold Story of a Privatized Water Spring
Zakia Salime

When I first visited Bensmim, an overwhelming silence loomed over this village, disturbing my expectations about a vibrant Middle Atlas Mountain resort. Though Bensmim has never been a hot tourist destination, the village became best known in activist circles for its sustained opposition to the privatization of its water Spring. Rebellion against this privatization lasted from 2001, when the project was presented to the village as a ‘marriage proposal’, to 2007, when the state implemented it under military tanks. This presentation illustrates how the untold story of this ‘rape case,’ as the activists dubbed it, is written all over this village through a traumatic silence.

Zakia Salime is a Fulbright scholar and Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Sociology at Rutgers University. She was The Presidential Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Women Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University (2016-2017) and a Visiting Professor at the University Paris-8 Vincennes- Saint-Denis (Spring 2016). She is the author of Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco (Minnesota 2011) and co-editor of Freedom Without Permission: Bodies and Space in the Arab Revolutions (Duke 2016). She is working on a book manuscript on gender and extractive governance in Morocco. She is the book series co-editor of African Religions, Social Realities (Ohio Press) and a co-editor of Souffles, a Pan-African Journal and Platform.

The Coloniality of Energy Interconnection Projects in and across the Southern Mediterranean
Benjamin Schütze

Almost 10 years after the effective failure of the Desertec project, new green electricity export projects are planning and pursuing the same idea: the large-scale export of electricity produced in renewable energy plants in the MENA to the Global North. Similar to the Desertec project, the TuNur, X-Links and Solar/Water projects focus on South-North export of clean electricity. In doing so, they contribute to the greening of economies in the Global North, create profitable opportunities for TNCs, undermine efforts at energy transition in the countries in which they are located, and reinforce a form of renewable energy colonialism. Based on past long-term research stays in Jordan, a pilot research trip to Morocco in summer 2022, attendance of COP28 in Dubai, desk research, and online interviews with involved project stakeholders, this presentation explores the coloniality of energy interconnection projects in and across the Southern Mediterranean.

Benjamin Schuetze is head of a DFG-funded Emmy Noether Research Group at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute (ABI) in Freiburg, Germany, and Fellow with the Young Academy for Sustainability Research at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). His research examines transregional authoritarian practices and the politics of intervention via a focus on the political economy of renewable energies in the Middle East and North Africa, and US and European “democracy promotion” initiatives in Jordan.