Papers by Vasiliki Touhouliotis
Environmental Humanities
Six years after the ceasefire that halted the 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel, southern Leban... more Six years after the ceasefire that halted the 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel, southern Lebanese indicted the remains of Israel's weapons for contaminating their lands, stunting their crops, and making them sick. Against local and international discourses claiming inconclusive evidence and uncertainty about the toxic effects of the war, my southern Lebanese interlocutors insisted on causally linking Israel's weapons to the perceived surge in cancer, infertility, and environmental degradation since 2006. Their insistence that war was causing this ongoing bodily and environmental malaise exposes the slow violence of war and challenges the liberal idea of war as a temporary event and paroxysm of violence. Taking southern Lebanese accounts seriously reveals how the liberal idea of war keeps Israeli weapons, toxic environments, and embodied pathologies causally separate and restricts what gets counted as a casualty of war. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, this article approaches the confirmed and suspected toxic remnants of war as toxic infrastructures that sediment and distribute war's lethal potential, years after the last bomb was dropped. Building on local accounts of the 2006 war that emphasize enduring environmental toxicity and its gendered effects, this article argues that southerners deployed their embodied knowledge of toxic infrastructures to contest the uncertainty about Israel's weapons and to produce new truths about the war. Southerners thus disputed liberal assumptions about the end of the war, challenged normative understandings of war casualties, and enacted new ethical frameworks for recognizing the belated injuries of the 2006 war.
Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares , 2018
Adjunct is the term used in the United States to refer to the contingent instructors that work in... more Adjunct is the term used in the United States to refer to the contingent instructors that work in higher education with poor pay, no benefits and short-term contracts. Adjuncts now make up the majority of the teaching professoriate at United States colleges and universities. Drawing on three years' experience working as an adjunct, the author offers an account of precarity in academia in the United States. While academic precarity is often assumed to affect all adjuncts equally, race, gender and class in fact lead to an uneven distribution, rendering certain bodies precarious even when they do not comprise adjuncts or contingent laborers. This makes it imperative to recog-nise that academic precarity encompasses a range of often incommensurable experiences. At the same time, discussions of precarity often overlook the complicity of full-time faculty staff and administrators who enforce precarity and reproduce hierarchies of academic lives by keeping adjuncts closed off from university resources and by asking them to work without compensation. How might a collective refusal of the reproduction of academic hierarchies be practiced without being depicted as evidence of not caring enough about our work? And how might such a refusal be a strategy for demanding better working conditions for all?
Environmental Humanities , 2018
Six years after the ceasefire that halted the 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel, southern Leban... more Six years after the ceasefire that halted the 2006 war between Lebanon and Israel, southern Lebanese indicted the remains of Israel's weapons for contaminating their lands, stunting their crops, and making them sick. Against local and international discourses claiming inconclusive evidence and uncertainty about the toxic effects of the war, my southern Lebanese interlocutors insisted on causally linking Israel's weapons to the perceived surge in cancer, infertility, and environmental degradation since 2006. Their insistence that war was causing this ongoing bodily and environmental malaise exposes the slow violence of war and challenges the liberal idea of war as a temporary event and paroxysm of violence. Taking southern Lebanese accounts seriously reveals how the liberal idea of war keeps Israeli weapons, toxic environments, and embodied pathologies causally separate and restricts what gets counted as a casualty of war. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, this article approaches the confirmed and suspected toxic remnants of war as toxic infrastructures that sediment and distribute war's lethal potential, years after the last bomb was dropped. Building on local accounts of the 2006 war that emphasize enduring environmental toxicity and its gendered effects, this article argues that southerners deployed their embodied knowledge of toxic infrastructures to contest the uncertainty about Israel's weapons and to produce new truths about the war. Southerners thus disputed liberal assumptions about the end of the war, challenged normative understandings of war casualties, and enacted new ethical frameworks for recognizing the belated injuries of the 2006 war.
Podcast by Vasiliki Touhouliotis
Conference Presentations by Vasiliki Touhouliotis
This paper is based on a larger ethnographic research project on the millions of cluster bombs dr... more This paper is based on a larger ethnographic research project on the millions of cluster bombs dropped by Israel on Lebanon during the 2006 war that challenges the assumption that war is defined by its temporal boundaries and its opposition to peace. More than simply continuing war by other means, these cluster bombs are entangled in past, and yet continuing, violence of previous iterations of war. Thus, the cluster bombs from the 2006 war led me to bombs from earlier wars and exposed me to narratives that presented the 2006 war as the latest iteration in a history of unending war. Whether in historical discourse or during informal conversations, discussions about war in South Lebanon presented it as a concatenation of dates—1973, 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996, 2006—suggesting that war is a series of iterations and iterable events in a continuous history. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper focuses on apprehensions of war in South Lebanon over four decades as a repetitive phenomenon and reflects on the challenge of writing about repetitiveness and durability while also capturing the singularity and difference of war's every iteration. It treats repetition as a trope in the depiction of war but also as a framework making war intelligible and visible. Finally, it examines how making sense of war as repetition constitutes part of the common sense of the southern Lebanese and explores how this both normalizes and intensifies war's violence, refuses its periodization and renders war an event that is perpetually anticipated.
The millions of cluster munitions that Israel dropped on the South of Lebanon in the final days o... more The millions of cluster munitions that Israel dropped on the South of Lebanon in the final days of the 2006 War turned into millions of fragments of deadly shrapnel, killing civilians and combatants alike, injuring bodies, lacerating the trunks of trees, cracking the asphalt of roads and puncturing the walls and roofs of homes. The large percentage of cluster bombs that failed to function as designed and did not explode upon impact with the ground continue to kill and injure six years after the war's official end. In this paper, I draw on fieldwork to generate an ethnographic account of shrapnel that exposes the multiple, human and non-human victims of cluster bomb explosions. By using shrapnel to elaborate a novel cartography of the wounds of war, my paper gives ethnographic depth to Elaine Scarry's understanding of injury as the primary objective of war and also demonstrates how injuries prolong the time of war, deferring the arrival of the 'post-war' and expanding the space of the battlefield. To further illustrate how shrapnel functions in Clausewitz's sense as a " continuation of war by other means, " I turn my attention from injury to examine the 'regime of care' constituted by the various sources of aid and humanitarian assistance given to ameliorate the damages wrought by cluster bomb shrapnel in South Lebanon. I build upon literature on injury and humanitarianism to show how the category of " war victim " and the services made available for these victims produce new structures of inclusion, exclusion and neglect.
Of the millions of cluster bombs that Israel dropped on the South of Lebanon during the 2006 War,... more Of the millions of cluster bombs that Israel dropped on the South of Lebanon during the 2006 War, an estimated twenty-five percent failed to explode upon impact with the ground and turned into de-facto landmines that endanger lives and livelihoods long after the cessation of hostilities. To abate and pacify the persistent danger of the bombs that still contaminate millions of meters of land in the South today, foreign governments, international humanitarian organizations and national institutions cooperated to fund and build the necessary infrastructure for de-mining the South's battlefields. Beginning almost immediately after the war's official end, de-mining still thrives today, drawing together a disparate set of actors and institutions and offering a lucrative source of income to many in the South. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork to analyze weapons removal and its purported pacification of South Lebanon. I build on anthropological studies of militarism that focus on the development and use of technologies of warfare to show how the attempt to pacify the South through the clearance of cluster bombs paradoxically participates in the further militarization of the region. I demonstrate this by showing that de-mining relies on military knowledge, institutions and terminology, mimics the hierarchical structure and dress of military battalions, and is financed by some of the very agencies implicated in designing contemporary wars. In conclusion, I argue that rather than signifying the end of conflict, de-mining prolongs war and renders it more durable.
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Papers by Vasiliki Touhouliotis
Podcast by Vasiliki Touhouliotis
Conference Presentations by Vasiliki Touhouliotis