Date. Tuesday, December 9, 2025, 6-8 pm (c.t.)
Location. SH 1.104
The end of the world is nothing new for many inhabitants of the Global South, and South Lebanon has just lived through another end of the world. In this talk, anthropologist Munira Khayyat revisits the South Lebanon borderland, where she has conducted longterm fieldwork in the wake of its almost total destruction after the latest season of war there. This talk insistently speaks from the spacetime of devastation, after the end of the world, and describes resistant ecologies that have taken root through generations of military destruction in this landscape of war. In this apocalyptic moment, and with the Lebanese military resistance in momentary abeyance, the inhabitants of Lebanese frontline villages continue to resist occupation and annihilation through ordinary acts of living. When life is the intentional target of the settler-colonial war-machine, life in all of its forms becomes resistance.
Munira Khayyat is an anthropologist and Clinical Associate Professor at the Arts and Humanities Division at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her research revolves around life in war, intimate genealogies of empire, and theory from the South. Her first book, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (University of California Press 2022), examines resistant ecologies in a world of perennial warfare. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in frontline villages along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, she examines war not only as a place of death and destruction, but also necessarily, as an environment of living.