Research and Writing
In contrast to popular discourses about “ancient” entrenched religious conflicts that circulate in popular media, I show through my ethnographic research in a working class suburb of Beirut called Bourj Hammoud how sectarianism is a material process that emerges in everyday life infrastructures. In the post-war context, infrastructures such as those provisioning power became a patchworked system: public sources are supplemented by private patrons and political parties, each of whom claim both payoffs and political loyalty along the way. The issue of whether infrastructure is a public good or a private resource now animates politics around the world, including in the United States. I treat Lebanon not as an exceptional case but rather as a paradigmatic study for understanding emergent processes. While conflict is expressed in sectarian terms, these infrastructural systems are part of what shapes the contours of political movements and even community identities.
This volume, co-edited with Martin Kornberger, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Julia Elyachar, Andrea Mennicken, Peter Miller, and Neil Pollock, introduces the notion of Thinking Infrastructures to explore a broad range of phenomena that structure attention, shape decision-making, and guide cognition. Thinking Infrastructures configure entities (via tracing, tagging), organise knowledge (via search engines), sort things out (via rankings and ratings), govern markets (via calculative practices, including algorithms), and configure preferences (via valuations such as recommender systems). Thus, Thinking Infrastructures, we collectively claim in this volume, inform and shape distributed and embodied cognition, including collective reasoning, structuring of attention and orchestration of decision-making.
Essays and Reviews
“Post-grid Imaginaries: Electricity, Generators, and the Future of Energy.” Public Culture, 2022.
"Garbage Infrastructure, Sanitation, and New Meanings of Citizenship in Lebanon." Postmodern Culture, vol. 30 no. 1, 2019..
"Pandemics in the Post-Grid Imaginary" for The Immanent Frame, Social Science Research Council
"Failed Infrastructure is Failed Politics" Public Books, September 20
"Essential Readings: Infrastructure" Jadaliyya, Aug 2018
"Collaborative Visual Methods: Parent Activism, Educational Justice and Photography in a Los Angeles Elementary School," co-authored with Sheena Nahm. Human Organization Vol. 77, No. 3, Fall 2018.
“Bourj Hammoud: Seeing the City’s Urban Textures and Layered Pasts,” Jadaliyya, March 2014.
“Becoming Armenian in Lebanon.” Middle East Report, MER 265 Spring 2013.
“Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film, and the Exploration of Social Life by Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz.” Book Review, American Ethnologist 38, no. 2 (2011): 394-395.