And What if one Spoke of the Land? Labour, Food and the Making of Space in Modern South Lebanon

Speakers: Martha Mundy, LSE; Rami Zurayk, American University of Beirut (AUB); Cynthia Gharios, AUB Chair: Michael Mason, LSE This event is the culmination of field research carried out over four years in collaboration with the American University of Beirut. Speaking to the work of the project ‘The Palimpsest of Agrarian Change’, Martha Mundy and Rami Zurayk and their colleagues Saker El-Nour and Cynthia Gharios present their findings on agrarian change in Lebanon. Food insecurity and ‘land grabs’ are as much a part of the Middle Eastern landscape as they are for neighbouring regions such as Africa. The historical layers that lie behind the conflicts over the capacity to produce food and access the land remain, however, remarkably poorly documented. This project documents shifts in the forms of food production and the political ecology of urbanisation that can be traced back to the legacies of Ottoman and French Mandate rule and, more recently, war and labour migration. The result is both a critique (and contribution) to the historiography of South Lebanon and an essay in a history of landscape grounded in the materiality of land, labour, food and the making of space. Recorded on 29 September 2015.