CURE out and about with Sana Chavoshian
WHEN
—
WHERE
University of Helsinki
Unioninkatu 34
00170 Helsinki
LANGUAGE
ENGLISH
PROGRAM
At the Finnish Anthropological Society Biennial Conference, Sana Chavoshian, Fellow at CURE, will present a paper on “A Mesopotamian Re(s)pair: Making the Green Wall along the Iran-Iraq Marshlands.”
What is the role of photosynthesis in making native and indigenous reparation politics? How does dust-wind unsettle the nature/culture binary and undergird the emergence of new atmospheric collectives? This paper places dust-wind at the centre of an ethnographic engagement with multi-species encounters and affective resonances that shape around green future making over the dried beds of Mesopotamian Marshlands across the war-torn borderlands of Iran and Iraq. While in Iraq reviving the marshlands was an internationally funded project with multiple European initiatives engaged after the fall of the Ba’ath regime, the conservation of the Iranian side of the marshlands are undertaken under restraining economic sanctions. For Arabs of the marshes on both sides of the border however, war and sanctions are environments of living. Chavoshian explores processes of respiration and regeneration of hope as nodes of ‘doing’ with enduring toxic contaminations and hazardous atmospheres in and around the marshes. I show how the contours of greening from plantation to rehabilitation and revival elude particular habitual knowledge and sensory practices. Social life here grows in the ruptures and wreckage of structurally violent worlds, where militarised biospheres yield planetary ecological effects.
For further information and the full programme click here.