Tabbi’at – Healthscapes

© Maziyar Ghiabi
© Maziyar Ghiabi

About

Healthscapes – Tabbi’at – is an interdisciplinary research network based at the University of Exeter. Led by Dr Semih Çelik, Dr Maziyar Ghiabi, and Dr Chris Sandal-Wilson, the network was founded in 2023 to bring together perspectives from across the humanities and social sciences and develop understandings of the entanglement of health and environment in the Middle East and North Africa.

Healthscapes aims to:

Map out the multiple historical and ongoing transformations in how environment and health have interacted across the region

Deconstruct the dualities which dominate scientific understandings of human and non-human entanglements, and shape societal and cultural responses to environmental and health changes, crises, and recoveries

Explore those epistemologies, generated within the region and through its interactions with other geographies, which offer more complex renderings of health in relation to human – non-human (dis)assemblages

Foster humanities and social sciences perspectives on the interconnection of health and environment, facilitate inter- and trans-disciplinary collaboration, and nurture genuine exchange outside academia with artists, activists, people with lived experience, and others.

Healthscapes has been supported by:

We gratefully acknowledge the kind support of the University of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, the Department of Archaeology and History, the Centre for Persian and Iranian Studies, the Societies and Cultures Institute, the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, and the HASS Enhancing Research Culture Fund, as well as the Wellcome Trust University Award ‘Living “Addiction” in States of Disruption’ (P.I. Maziyar Ghiabi).

What’s in a name?

Tabbi’at – Healthscapes

Tabbi’at is a wordplay that stands for the entanglements of nature (al-tabia’), health and medicine (tıbb’), and environment (bi’aat).