Bread, Development, and Politics

CCAS is pleased to host two scholars, Jessica Barnes and José Ciro Martínez, to discuss development and the use of resources in the Middle East and North Africa.

Jessica Barnes’s work examines the cultural, political, and material dimensions of resource use and environmental change. Her publications include Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt (Duke University Press, 2014), Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change (coedited with Michael Dove, Yale University Press, 2015), Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt (Duke University Press, 2022), and articles in a number of journals. She is currently developing a new ethnographic project on the racialized and class-inflected ways in which air pollution shapes daily life in London. Jessica received her PhD in sustainable development from Columbia University and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina.

José Ciro Martínez is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Politics at the University of York. His research explores the politics of food, welfare, drugs and political authority in the Middle East and North Africa, drawing on archival and ethnographic methods. He is committed to modes of political inquiry attentive to the seemingly ordinary and mundane.

Register here.