Hadeel Badarni’s research investigates recent scientific efforts to convert military technologies into civilian use, in particular smart agriculture technology (agritech) in Israel/Palestine. It seeks to understand the emergence of high-tech ecologies made possible under the alliance of agricultural and military technologies in Israel/Palestine.  

As civilian afterlives of military know-how, Israeli agricultural technologies take legacies and practices of colonial domination as their preconditions and epistemological lifeline. Through such formations, operational military technologies give way to newly engineered plant life and growth. How can certain conditions make concepts such as “life” or “growth” an explicit phenomenon in a particular field of knowledge foregrounding what may have thus far remained imperceptible? What ways of thinking growth and management of life become possible in the agricultural sector in Israel/Palestine? How to understand technoscientific afterlives of agricultural capital in Israel/Palestine? She aims to problematize the relationship between the colonial production of indigenous death, and subsequent production of colonized plant life, with a view beyond binaries of mortality and vitality, and organic/inorganic modes of being under technoscientific capitalism. More broadly, taking Israeli recent military-agritech symbiosis as a case in point, her research explores formations of “techno-nature” in their ecological form and within a continuum of colonial legacies and capitalist accumulation.  

Biography:

Hadeel Badarni is a A PhD student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She holds a Law degree in Israeli law (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and an LLM in International Law (Georgetown University). Her research work explores technoscientific entanglements within agricultural economies and productions of high-tech ecologies in Israel/Palestine.