ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Disruptive Encounters: Historicizing More-Than-Human Lives in Palestine

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel examines the development and workings of knowledge systems in relation to the particular environment of Palestine. Focusing on knowledge and practices that grew out of construction projects, agriculture, public health campaigns, as well as forestry and conservation work, and how those operated in the context of war, displacement, and structural violence, the panel seeks to articulate the many aspects that connect the formation of expertise to this environment, how authority over the natural world was formed, and the cases in which this expertise and authority were challenged. The four contributions examine human and non-human movement between spaces within and encompassing Palestine; each of them is dedicated to one form of life, around which knowledge practices are organized: an animal, a bacterium, an oomycete, and a tree. By shedding light on the Palestinian environment as a locus for negotiation, debate, and contestation among colonial, state, settler, and indigenous actors, this panel aims to ground histories of Palestine within the field of the history of science.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, MPIWG

Individual Presentations

• The Colonial Hump: Cameleering as Settler Science in Palestine - Dotan Halevy, Tel Aviv University

• Tobacco’s Enemy Number One: Palestinian Fellahin Dealing with Blue Mold under Military Government - Basma Fahoum, Ben Gurion University

• Conservation and erasure of Palestinian environments: Agro-ecological landscape transformation in the Latrun area - Alaa Iktash, London School of Economics

• Brucellosis, Uncertainty, and the Humanimal Body - Tamar Novick, Technical University of Munich