Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Anbar province and Iraqi Kurdistan, this talk foregrounds the practices of displaced people who stubbornly outlast their occupiers, returning to homes that feel estranging, repairing war-damaged land, and surviving into futures to which they have been disinvited. Resurgency expands the categories of what war is —and what resistance looks like— by asking what actions make sense when conditions of survival are diminished, and when today may be better than tomorrow. 

Kali Rubaii is a cultural anthropologist at Purdue University whose scholarship focuses on displacement, health justice, and the environmental impacts of war. She is the author ofResurgency: Outlasting the War on Terror in Iraq and co-editor ofThe Social Properties of Concrete. She leads theParts Per Million Project, an interdisciplinary, international team of researchers concerned with multi-generational health effects of environmental exposures from the war industry. She is also a Co-I ofWar and Geos, a project researching military supply chains and the environmental legacies of warfare.

 

This event is co-sponsored by the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania.