Dr Frederick Wojnarowski

Fred Wojnarowski joined LSE as a postdoctoral fellow in September 2022, after completing his PhD at the University of Cambridge (2021) and is now a guest teacher. His research straddles environmental, economic, political and historical anthropology with a comparative ethnographic focus between Jordan (and the wider Mashriq) and Western Europe. He has worked on various themes, including protest and political activism, colonial afterlives, socio-political categorisation, changing foodways, political ecology and most recently water scarcity and environmental activism. These cohere around a central interest in interrogating and historicising changing regimes of value and contestation in times of environmental and economic crises. Methodologically, his work combines ethnography (including 18 moths’ fieldwork in Jordan), archival research, ethnographic readings of development, corporate and policy documents and discourse analysis.

Fred's current postdoctoral project examines how activists, technopolitical professionals, and state actors imagine water and the socio-ecological relationships it instantiates under conditions of scarcity and inequality, in a setting widely portrayed in development circles as among the world’s most water-poor - central Jordan. This work aims to apprehend how processes of abstracting and financializing water as a resource and commodity create uneven socio-ecological devastation, and the role of scarcity discourses in these processes. It engages with interdisciplinary questions around valuing nature and environmental commons, and around the role of activist scholarship in fights for environmental justice. This postdoctoral project has resulted in a proposed monograph at JHUP, entitled Bled dry: anticipating and contesting water scarcity in central Jordan, as well as several peer-reviewed articles, blog posts and presentations.

This current interest in water and environment emerged ethnographically from doctoral research (PhD Social Anthropology, University Cambridge 2021) among activists in Hirak Dhiban, a rural protest movement prominent in waves of contestation since the Arab Uprisings of 2011, following their pivot towards campaigning on water and the environment, as instantiations of a corrupt and contaminated political economy. This doctoral research involved fieldwork with precarious youth in rural and peri-urban settled “Bedouin villages” in Jordan, examining the rise of rural and tribal protest movements since the 2011 uprisings in their larger historical and social context. The thesis explored the role of colonial and post-colonial nation- building, development initiatives, regimes of land ownership, bureaucracy and nationalized culture in at once settling and pacifying Bedouin as nomadic pastoralists, while simultaneously reproducing categories of Bedouin and tribe as historical imaginaries. This work is the subject of a monograph under contract and submitted for final peer review with the British Academy Monograph series (via Liverpool University Press) entitled History and protest in Jordan’s Bedouin villages: anticipating unsettling times.

Fred is currently developing two new research strands, building on this interest in water. The first (at an early stage) is ethnographically engaged with water activists in the Thames Valley and in other European cities, campaigning against the pollution of major river systems by privatized utilities at a time where both consumer bills and shareholder profits are rising. This project will consider how these activists construct and contest regimes of value, through practices of documentation via ‘citizen science,’ litigation, and political campaigning on the one hand, and in various sorts of ritual practice intended to generate forms of more-than-human sociality and intimacy with rivers and other beings, on the other. The work aims to show how ideas of cosmopolitics have taken on a life far from the Andes or Amazonia along the Thames, a river at the heart of histories of empire, industrialization and the birth of the networked utility and the joint stock corporation, in ways which may be unsettling for concepts of indigeneity, appropriation and alterity, but which also show their centrality to vital projects to resist and undo capitalist socio-ecological destruction in the present. The second strand involves a new focus on histories of changing state and developmental hydraulic mission in Palestine and Jordan, recovering the lost connections between current modes of neoliberal environmental governance and earlier high modernist schemes to refashion nature and society through Bedouin sedenterisation and expanding irrigated agriculture intro the Syrian Badia. This involves a series of comparisons between archival, legal, institutional and ethnographic traces of state-making processes, from the Late Ottoman rule to the present day, tracing how irrigation and water management strategies were integral to wider shifts in modes of governance, property and social relations.

Before joining LSE, he completed a PhD in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2021. He initially studied archaeology and anthropology at the University of Oxford, and later an MA in anthropology and development at SOAS. He has also worked as a school history teacher and in public policy. Fred is committed to practicing an engaged, historically-informed and outward facing anthropology, that speaks inclusively to diverse public audiences and to pressing societal and global challenges, while exposing their relations to deep histories of power and coloniality.

Expertise

Corruption, Environmental Justice, Water Scarcity, Political Economy, Protest, History, Colonialism, Empire, Non-state Politics, Land Settlement.