A germinal second project is a wide-ranging oral history collaboration that seeks to document how diverse people have tried to build fulfilling lives on the margins and outside of capitalist work structures and values.Īt Tufts University, I teach a wide range of classes on environmentalism, capitalism, labor politics, value beyond work, interspecies relations, food production, political economy, ethnography, and the rural United States. The current aspiration of this research is to be able to articulate more positive and radical visions of deindustrialization and deindustrial futures - distinct from the precariousness, poverty, and diminished livelihoods that have tended to follow urban industrial divestment. This book will explore how a wide range of people struggle to redeem, remake, and overcome the social legacies and ecological remains of those infamous meatpacking yards that generated facets of industrial capitalism as it still exists it today. The first concerns the many lingering traces of large-scale animal slaughter in Chicago, and it begins with the closing of the Union Stock Yards in 1971. I am in the planning and research stages of two subsequent book-length projects. How Nature Works was awarded the 2021 Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize. In collaboration with the anthropologist Sarah Besky and others, I have also published an edited book called How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (SAR/UNM Press 2019) that surveys how transformed, unstable, and ruined environments are altering the value of human work and livelihood. Porkopolis was awarded the 2021 Diana Forsythe Prize (CASTAC/SAW/GAD), 2nd place for the 2021 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing (Society for Humanistic Anthropology), and an honorable mention for the 2021 Gregory Bateson Prize (Society for Cultural Anthropology). It examines the transformations to human existence - in terms of living arrangements, the value of labor, biological embodiment, and senses of identity - necessary to sustain contemporary qualities and quantities of industrial animal life in the rural United States.
My first book, Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm (Duke University Press 2020), is an ethnography of work within some of the world's largest meat corporations, one that follows the making of the modern pig across every facet of its existence from genetics to 1,100 post-death commodities. My research is concerned with the politics of industrial labor and life in the post-industrial United States. Finally, I have been involved with the production of bilingual Arabic and English children's books about refugee lives, including The Boy and the Wall. I have produced the documentary "Degrees of Incarceration" (2010), an hour-long documentary that explores how, with creativity and love, a Palestinian community responds to the crisis of political imprisonment. In addition to academic writing, I also regularly write for such outlets as Jadaliyya, Middle East Report. It asks what we can learn about journalism and popular political action when we place Palestinian journalists at the center of an inquiry about U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford University Press 2013) is an ethnography of production of US news during the second Palestinian Intifada. It examines how Palestinians in this refugee camp strive to resist three authorities, the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian Authority administration, and the United Nations Relief Works Agency through struggles over land, water, bodies, and expression.
My second ongoing project examines Palestinian popular politics in a West Bank refugee camp. I argues that speech is always an embodied and emplaced act. Through ethnographies of protest as well as of more everyday forms of expression, I analyze the barriers to these two groups speaking to and with each other. The first, tentatively entitled "Permission to Converse: Laws, Bullets, and other Roadblocks to a Palestinian Exchange," addresses the relationship between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank, two groups that are positioned slightly differently in relation to Israeli settler-colonialism. I am currently working on two book projects. My research revolves around expression, space, media, and settler colonialism. Media, journalism, the Middle East, expressivity, human rights, knowledge production, democracy, ethnography of place
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