Healthscapes in Disruption

WHEN 12th June 2024

WHERE Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter

The Middle East is a laboratory to unthink the disruptive order of the world. With indiscriminate wars, depopulation, famine, erasure of the living environment, environmental catastrophe, and the pursuit of techno-populist solutions led by local hydrocarbon capitalists and global financiers, the region is today condensing world crises on a local level. Nowhere more than in the Middle East, the contradictions of global modernity and capitalism manifest themselves more brutally and synergistically.

In the second edition of the Healthscapes Annual Workshop, we invited contributors to engage with thinking the Middle East as a laboratory for studying ‘Healthscapes in Disruption.’ We experimented with the politics of health and environment as interlinked or condensed into a holistic question that has the potential to illuminate the state-of-affairs of world orders. To pursue such a conceptual agenda, we were guided by one epistemic persuasion: to work through the encounter of anti-disciplinary practices.

The workshop brought together overlapping lines of inquiry situated in states of disruption as shaped and devastated by war, infrastructural fallout, health and care depletion, and spaces of social and ethical abandonment. These included fields of inquiry related to health and environmental humanities, gender studies, the politics of health and space, architectural and geographical humanities, literary and philosophical studies, and more. The workshop’s goal was to showcase methodological unruliness as being generative of radical unthinking and transformation in the established categories of thought in gender, health, space, and perception.

Contributions to the workshop included:

Ghazal Mosafer Zadeh (Delft, The Netherlands) and Vincent Baptist (Delft, The Netherlands) – Pipeline Dualities in Abadan: Story of Shaping a Peterohealthscape
Anil Kaan Yildirim (Exeter) and Ömer Faruk Cingir (Ankara, Türkiye) – Disruption of Governmentality: The case of Ilic
Semih Celik (Exeter) – Famine and healthscapes: Insights from the mid-19th century Ottoman world
Kamyar Salavati (Exeter) – Building to destroy
William Gallois (Exeter) – The ethics of reanimating ruins
Hannah Cowdell (Exeter) – Border cases: Lebanese and Israeli medical case studies of differences of sex development against histories of socio-political violence and occupation
Film Screening (26 mins), Pouring Water on Troubled Oil (2023) – Screening and discussion with Nariman Massoumi (Bristol)
Film Screening (31 min) Le Voyage de Yashar (2019) – Screening and discussion with Sébastien De Monbrison (Paris, France)