Peasant Economies and Ecologies
Cornell University, Spring 2023
What are peasantries, and why do they matter today? We will learn how peasant communities interact with land, plants, and animals, and how they are integrated into national governance and global markets. We will explore the contradictory ways—as reactionary and revolutionary, doomed and flourishing—that peasants have appeared in modern economic, political, and environmental projects. Topics include classic accounts of capitalism and agrarian change; anti-colonialism and national liberation; debates over development, indigeneity, and gender; and emerging concerns over fair trade, sustainable agriculture, and climate change.
Palestine and the Palestinians
Cornell University, Spring 2023
This course is an introduction to Palestine and the Palestinians. It begins with modern Palestinian history and ends in the present-day. We will focus on Palestinian life: in historic Palestine; in the refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria; and in the diasporas from the Gulf to the Americas. We will study Palestinian society and the ordinary people that make its economy, culture, and politics. We will discover what Palestine can teach us about agrarian change, anti-colonialism, humanitarianism, sovereignty, and capitalism. By the end of the course, we’ll have a better idea about the global forces that shape Palestine and the Palestinians, and what this place and its people reveal about the world that we live in.
Indigenous Rights and Capitalism
University of Chicago, Spring 2022
This course explores how indigenous rights emerge in relation to the uneven incorporation of indigenous land, labor, and commodities into global circuits of capital. Whether in racist discourses about primitiveness or backwardness, or romantic ones about environmentalism and resistance, it is still common to encounter narratives that assume indigenous people and places exist outside of modernity. This course, on the other hand, asks that we think indigeneity and capitalism together. Readings will consist primarily of ethnographies and cover Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas. We will study how different actors and interests—from Palestinian real estate developers and Cherokee small business owners to Zapotec coffee cooperatives and Lauje cultivators—use economic practices to defend territory, claim rights, and build communities. We will ask how these experiences contribute to critiques of inequality and dispossession, and how they clarify what is at stake in struggles over autonomy, sustainability, and sovereignty.
Land and Rights
University of Chicago, Winter 2022
What are land rights? Why are they so ubiquitous, and what do they do? In this course, we will study how regimes of individual and collective rights emerge and analyze the complicated ways they shape conflicts over private property, geopolitical borders, ancestral homes, and common land. Each section of the course examines how land is at the heart of economic development, territorial sovereignty, gender equality, or environmental policy, and explores how rights can both enable justice and redistribution as well as dispossession and exclusion. Course readings consist of ethnographic studies and engaged research that foreground how experts and laypeople make claims to land and show us what effects theories, laws, and narratives about rights have when people put them to work in the world.
Human Rights in World Civilizations
University of Chicago, Fall 2021
This two-quarter sequence explores how human rights have been constructed across transnational, imperial, national, and local spaces in a variety of idioms while exposing students to their contested genealogies and limits. We explore the history, philosophy, and rhetoric of human rights through a variety of disciplinary lenses. The sequence is primary source driven and discussion based, with readings drawn from a range of texts from political philosophy and legal texts, to novels and films.
Rural Palestine: Natives, Peasants, and Revolutionaries
Brown University, Spring 2021
This course looks at how the inhabitants of rural Palestine have been seen (and seen themselves) as natives, peasants, and revolutionaries. Over the 19th and 20th centuries, rural Palestine has been understood as both isolated and globalized; timeless and transforming; and unchangeable and critically vulnerable to the forces of modernity. The native, the peasant, and the revolutionary have emerged as different forces and institutions—European missionaries and Palestinian activists, international NGOs and local cooperatives, village cultivators and urban CEOs, seed banks and financial banks—draw on rural practices, knowledges, and histories. How, this course asks, does the rural past become the basis for claims on, and struggles for, the future of Palestine?
Labor and the Long Downturn in the Middle East
Brown University, Spring 2020
This course examines the question of labor in the contemporary Middle East. The 1970s saw a global economy defined increasingly by deindustrialization, intensified competition, financialization, and squeezes on profitably. For workers, these changes have meant that technological development, agrarian change, debt, and increasing precarity has transformed who works, where they work, and the sorts of politics that work (or its absence) gives rise to. This course seeks to examine these wider concerns within the context of the Middle East. Through a focus on social history and ethnographic accounts, it seeks to illuminate the ways in which different groups of workers experience and grapple with these broader transformations. The first part of the course introduces some general discussions of labor, unemployment, and class formation. The bulk of the course moves from this theoretical abstraction to detailed empirical accounts, exploring how these cases extend or challenge these theoretical arguments. The course concludes by examining the role of both the working class and those that have found themselves deserted by the wage in the Arab uprisings and beyond.
“From Palestine to the Pipeline”: Land, Property, and Indigenous Politics
Johns Hopkins University, Spring 2019
The protests at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline were the most important indigenous political mobilization in decades. Beginning in the spring of 2016 and continuing into the next winter, thousands of people joined the encampments in an effort to block the construction of the pipeline. Like Occupy before it, Standing Rock was a site in which crucial American political questions—climate change, petro-capitalism, police militarization and violence—converged. The battle around the pipeline again illustrated that Indigenous dispossession is not a shameful, closed chapter in American history, but a process that continues to define both native communities and the liberal settler state. But Standing Rock also demonstrated the global reach of anti-colonial politics. From First Nations in Canada to Palestinians who sent delegations to the encampment (this course takes its title from a September 2016 statement issued by the Palestinian Youth Movement), Standing Rock shows us that Indigenous mobilizations, although grounded in a specific territory, are also part of a global political movement. These connections inspire the form and central question of this course: what are the ideas, histories, and forces that set the conditions of possibility and foreclosure of Indigenous politics today? We will explore this question over the semester through then lens of property. As is well known, control over land (and its resources) has historically constituted the core of the struggle between settler and native. As such, the imagining, making, regulating, and exchanging of property all have important implications for indigenous territory and sovereignty. This course considers the following questions: how do ideas about rights and ownership develop in settler colonies in relation to the native inhabitants? How do these ideas shape market relations, regulations, and property law? And how do Indigenous people navigate the constraints and possibilities of property to maintain or transform their own social formations?
Science Fiction and the Radical Imagination
Johns Hopkins University, Winter Intersession, 2017
This course takes the following idea as a starting point: science fiction is inseparable from social crisis. We will discuss how science fiction imagines the terminal points of crisis and the alternative forms of social and political organization that could come into being on the other side. Importantly, the line between science fiction and social theory is not so clear-cut. We will explore very different texts—from fiction and film to economic and feminist theory—that are all unified by a critique of the present and/or a radical vision for the future. Throughout our discussions, we will return to these three central questions. First, how is social crisis significant to radical science fiction and theory? Second, in what ways does science fiction allow us to better understand the inner workings of key social categories like race, labor, gender, value, and state? And third, what are the limits to the sorts of transformations that science fiction allows us to imagine?