This event is the culmination of field research carried out over four years in collaboration with the American University of Beirut.
Speaking to the work of the project ‘The Palimpsest of Agrarian Change’, Martha Mundy and Rami Zurayk and their colleagues Saker El-Nour and Cynthia Gharios present their findings on agrarian change in Lebanon. Food insecurity and ‘land grabs’ are as much a part of the Middle Eastern landscape as they are for neighbouring regions such as Africa. The historical layers that lie behind the conflicts over the capacity to produce food and access the land remain, however, remarkably poorly documented.
This project documents shifts in the forms of food production and the political ecology of urbanisation that can be traced back to the legacies of Ottoman and French Mandate rule and, more recently, war and labour migration. The result is both a critique (and contribution) to the historiography of South Lebanon and an essay in a history of landscape grounded in the materiality of land, labour, food and the making of space.
Event Details
Speakers: Martha Mundy, LSE; Rami Zurayk, American University of Beirut (AUB); Cynthia Gharios, AUB
Chair: Michael Mason, LSE
Date: Tuesday 29 September 2015
Time: 16.30-18.00
Location: Room 9.04, Tower 2, Clement's Inn, LSE
Event Hashtag: #LSELebanon
Attendance: Registration for this event has now closed.
Speaker
Martha Mundy is Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Rami Zurayk is Professor of Ecosystem Management at the American University of Beirut and Acting Director of the Interfaculty Graduate Environmental Sciences Program in Beirut.
Cynthia Gharios is a researcher based at the American University of Beirut.