Hadeel Badarni's project “Ecologies of Settler-Colonial Know-How: Israel’s Mode of Environmental Apprehension,” combines ethnographic and archival methods to theorize Israeli settler colonialism through the interface of Israel’s military and agro-industrial technoscience. It studies the modes through which Israel strives to apprehend the high-tech geographies it claims to subsume and make bloom in historic Palestine. 

Tracing contemporary and earlier projects of Israel’s weapons-agricultural technoscience alongside the terraforming thrust of its colonial expansion, Badarni's project elaborates on the geopolitical conditions and psychosocial dispositions under which Israel designs, tests, and weaponizes its ever-refinable means of destruction to expand and resettle its alienness environmentally. Drawing on 15 months of fieldwork in Palestine, she asks: what does an ecology-making enterprise entail in so far as it apprehends the natural and social world militarily? How have lineages of modern scientific knowability and thresholds of “proven effectiveness” shaped Israel’s environmental know-how? And what is at stake when the entire settler-colony is terrorized and territorialized into experimental reservoirs for technoscientific efforts to remodel what ‘world ecology’ is and can be? 

Biography:

Hadeel Badarni is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Working across environmental anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, political economy, and anti-colonial thought, her research explores the settler-colonial condition through its environmental and technoscientific modalities. Her ethnographic work was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Pozen Center for Human Rights, Leiffer Research Fellowship, Palestinian American Research Center, and the Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph Field Research Award. Badarni has instructed courses in anthropology and social theory.