University of California, Santa Barbara
Food and Justice (spring 2026)
Our food system is global. For some, this arrangement ensures access to healthy food from nearly every part of the planet. But many others inhabit a world of violent displacement, brutal working conditions, and starvation, one in which the very people who grow the world’s food cannot feed their families. What would it take to build a just food system? To answer this question, we will study the many efforts—from organic certification and cooperatives to land occupations and food sovereignty movements—to transform the production, circulation, and consumption of food. We will explore how these struggles illuminate the social and ecological problems created by our current food system, and how we might create something better.
Property, Power, and the Ownership of Everything
Is there anything that cannot be owned? Today, it seems as if everything—from the ground under our feet to the ideas in our heads—is, or has the potential to become, property. What brought about this state of affairs? Who benefits, and who loses? And why does it feel so difficult to change? To answer these questions, we will first study some concepts and methods for critically studying property. Then, we will examine how property has colonized everything: from land and housing, to food and nature, to knowledge and culture, and even the future itself. We will discover how property has become a truly global form of power, and the political, social, and environmental consequences of creating a world in which everything can be owned.
Cornell University
Environmental Justice and the Middle East
This course introduces students to the study of environmental justice through the Middle East. We cover long-standing environmental problems emerging from fossil fuel extraction, drought, colonialism, and desertification; contemporary problems of climate change mitigation, green cities, and sustainable agricultural technology; and questions raised by the growing power of the Gulf states and their involvement in a range of environmental issues, from land grabs in Sudan to the control of water in Arizona. We will begin with key texts about environmental justice, before moving into case studies—consisting of academic work, journalism, and other media—to explore different aspects of environmental justice.
Peasant Economies and Ecologies
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
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.
University of Chicago
Indigenous Rights and Capitalism
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
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
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.
Brown University
Rural Palestine: Natives, Peasants, and Revolutionaries
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
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.
Johns Hopkins University
“From Palestine to the Pipeline”: Land, Property, and Indigenous Politics
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?