Notes on the Contributors

Jumana Emil Abboud is a Palestinian artist living and working in Jerusalem and London. She conjoins folklore with land-water mythologies and entanglements in the present, and works across drawing, workshopping, and wording to support imaginaries of the oppressed. Her creative motives emphasize a time and place where humans and more-than-humans are companions within storytelling and spirited waters. Her recent work has been presented in numerous exhibitions including at the 8th Thessaloniki Biennale (2023), 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022), documenta 15 (2022), Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea (2019), Darat al Funun, Amman, Jordan (2017), Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden (2017), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK (2016), Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah (2016), and the 56th Venice Biennale (2015).

Marwa Arsanios has a practice that tackles structural and infrastructural questions using different devices, forms, and strategies from architectural spaces and their transformation and adaptability throughout conflict to artist run spaces and temporary conventions between feminist communes and cooperatives. Arsanios was a researcher in the Fine Art Department at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht from 2010 to 2012. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna. Her most recent solo shows include Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany (2023), Mosaic Rooms, London (2022), and Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2021). Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including: documenta 15 (2022), Mardin Biennial, Turkey (2022), the film programme at the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022), 3rd Autostrada Biennale, Pristina (2021), and 11th Berlin Biennale (2020). Her films have been screened at Cinéma du Réel, Paris (2021); Rotterdam Film Festival (2021); Film Fest, Hamburg (2020); FID Marseille (2015, 2019, and 2022).

Nadine Hattom was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1980, and grew up in Abu Dhabi before migrating to Australia. She is an artist working with photography, sculpture, and installation. Taking a reading of landscape as a cultural process as her starting point, Hattom’s work is an exploration of space and place, unravelling narratives of migration, region, representation, and landscape. Hattom studied Photomedia at the College of Fine Arts, Sydney. Her recent exhibitions include the Iraq Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam (2017), Fotomuseum, Antwerp (2017), and the Marrakech Biennale 6 (2016). Hattom was selected for the 2018 BPA — Berlin program for artists. She currently resides and works in Berlin.

Munira Khayyat is associate professor of Anthropology at NYUAD in the United Arab Emirates. She was previously assistant professor of anthropology at the American University in Cairo and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 2018 to 2019. Her research revolves around ecologies of life in war and genealogies of empire. She is the author of A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival (University of California Press 2022) and her essays have appeared in American Ethnologist, Public Culture, JMEWS, Anthropology News, and HAU.

Kali Rubaii is an assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University. Her research explores the environmental impacts of militarism, namely how families in Anbar, Iraq struggle to survive and recover from transnational counterinsurgency projects. Her research focuses on the environmental impacts of less-than-lethal militarism, and how military projects (re)arrange political ecologies in the name of ‘letting live’. She also traces toxic material relations that are reflective of warfare as a durable structure.

Françoise Vergès grew up on Réunion Island in an anticolonial feminist family, learning early on in life about coloniality and gender, race, and class as systemic systems of domination. She worked as a journalist and editor, and was an antiracist and feminist activist before getting her PhD in Political Theory at Berkeley University in 1995. She has written films about Maryse Condé and Aimé Césaire, organized decolonial visits in museums, co-founded the collective Decolonize the Arts (2015–2020), and was president of the French Committee for the Remembrance and History of Slavery (2008–2012), during which she fought for better recognition of the importance of slavery in the making of European modernity. Vergès writes about the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, the economy of extraction, the post-museum, feminisms, organizes workshops with artists and activists, and contributes to antiracist collectives. Her recent publications include Programme de désordre absolu. Decoloniser le musée (2023 [forthcoming in English 2024]), De la violence coloniale dans l’espace public (2021), A Feminist Theory of Violence (2021), and A Decolonial Feminism (2020).

Umut Yıldırım is an assistant professor of anthropology at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Switzerland. Her work explores transnational development programmes, expert networks, and aid policies in the Armenian/Kurdish region of Turkey, with a focus on the environmental effects of forced military migration and the political and ecological mobilization war generates. Her research is available in platforms such as Jadaliyya (2022), Current Anthropology (2021, 2023 fc), and Anthropological Theory (2019). She is currently working on her first monograph, titled Low Intensities: Politics of War and Extraction in A Middle Eastern Capital.