📅 Date: Tuesday, January 27th
⏰ Time: 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
📍 Location: AP 246 (Anthro boardroom), 19 Ursula Franklin Street
Abstract: Although infrastructures are often built to endure for long periods, they are typically analyzed within the context of specific historical moments or governing systems. Building on the growing body of infrastructural studies that adopt a longue durée approach, this talk addresses telecommunications infrastructure in Palestine-Israel by exploring its development since its establishment during the British colonial period. Rather than framing the history of the telephone as a linear tale of modernization, this talk examines its inverse expressions – sustained lack, obstacles, erasure, willful neglect, and de-prioritization, and uncovers the different mechanisms underpinning these developments, as well as the biopolitical and necropolitical rationales behind them. Tracing the evolution of telephone infrastructure over the past century arguably reveals not only patterns of resemblance, reemergence, and continuity in power relations, but also the cumulative impact of infrastructural injustice over time.
Bio: Dr. Yara Sa’di-Ibraheem is a postdoctoral fellow in the initiative of Hearing Palestine at the University of Toronto, specializes in political geography, with research interests that include indigenous geographies and temporalities, settler colonialism, neoliberal urbanism, and infrastructure, focusing on the Middle East, particularly Palestine. Her main research explores socio-political dimensions of infrastructure in colonial settings— principally telecommunications and playgrounds—as well as neoliberal planning under settler colonialism and the spatial-temporal experiences of indigenous communities.