Monika Halkort in conversation with Munira Khayyat
A LANDSCAPE OF WAR

What worlds take root in war? This talk takes us to the southern border of Lebanon where resistant ecologies thrive amid perennial gusts of war. In frontline villages armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings and scattered landmines have become the conditions within which everyday life is waged. Here, multi-species partnerships such as tobacco-farming and goat-herding carry life through seasons of destruction. Neither green-tinged utopia nor total devastation, these survival collectives make life possible within an insistently deadly region. Sourcing an anthropology of war from where it is lived decolonizes distant theories of war and brings to light creative practices forged in the midst of ongoing devastation. Like other unlivable worlds of the Anthropocene, war is a place where life must go on.

Munira Khayyat teaches anthropology at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is the author of A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (University of California Press 2022). Her writing has appeared in American Ethnologist, Public Culture, JMEWS, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology News, HAU and a number of edited volumes. Khayyat was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2018-19). Before joining NYUAD, she taught at the American University in Cairo (2013-23) and the American University of Beirut (2011-13). She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University.

Monika Halkort is a researcher and lecturer at the School for Transformation at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Her research focuses on the political and moral ecology of techno-scientific infrastructures and their historical entanglements with colonial knowledge regimes. Next to her academic work, she is a regular contributor to the Ö1 programs Radiokolleg and Diagonal.

84: Resilience: Dealing with Professional Rejection