Keynote Speakers
"Overkillability and the Genocide in Gaza: The Expansions of Spaces of Killing and the Logic of Evisceration" by Dr Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
The talk will discuss overkill during the genocide in Gaza, not as excessive brutality but as a settler-colonial formation that organizes death as a totalizing condition of life. As a colonial technology, overkill operates through the systematic evisceration of the colonized sociopolitical body—its cohesion, interdependence, and capacity for regeneration. It subjects populations to continuous and routinized death, rendering human life, family, and community continuity not sacred but instrumental. Death itself becomes capital—extracted, weaponized, and circulated as both power and commodity. In this regime, the destruction of life and infrastructure is not collateral but constitutive: overkill transforms vitality into a means of accumulation and demonstration, a currency of colonial power that is tested, displayed, and sold to produce further capital for the settler state and its global enablers. The talk will conclude by arguing that speaking about the settler colonial regime of overkill centers the unending dispossession and slaughter of the starved, maimed, wounded, displaced, almost dead, and dead as an enfleshed state criminality.
Dr Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian- a Palestinian Jerusalemite feminist whose scholarship on the settler colonial state’s brutality, unchilding, securitized and sacralized politics, state crime, law and society, and global feminist politics, challenges epistemic violence. She is a Professor Extraordinarius- University of South Africa, the Global Chair in Law- Queen Mary University of London, and a visiting Professor- Princeton University. Author of numerous books among them Militarization and Violence Against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: The Palestinian Case Study” (Cambridge University Press, 2010; Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge University Press 2015); “Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding” Cambridge University Press 2019); co-edited volumes Engaged Students in Conflict Zones, Community-engaged Courses in Israel as a Vehicle for Change (Palgrave Macmillan Press 2019); When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press 2021); The Cunning of Gender Violence (Duke University Press 2023), and a co-edited volume with Stephen Sheehi entitled: Abolitionism, Settler Colonialism and State Crime, 2024.
"The Fire Will Never Cease: Defiant Ecologies in South Lebanon" by Dr Munira Khayyat
Scorched earth, blackened skies, poisoned waters and fires everywhere. This talk shares urgent truths from the grounds of resistant being amidst ceaseless wars in South Lebanon. Here, rooted communities defiantly confront seasonal military assaults by imperial and settler-colonial war-machines as the intentional destruction of life. War is lived across decades as repeated environmental devastation upon the land, its dwellers and keepers, who together confront methodical annihilation and enduring occupation through defiant acts of return and repair. Speaking from the shattered grounds of the present amidst the immediacy of ongoing wars and occupation and so-called ceasefires, this talk brings to light the multi-species ecologies that resist and survive endless seasons of scorched-earth devastation in South Lebanon.
Dr Munira Khayyat
Munira Khayyat is an anthropologist whose 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.
Khayyat is currently working on a second book that fleshes out the complex heart of empire in Saudi Arabia. Heart of Black Gold draws on a personal archive meticulously created by her maternal grandfather, who was among the first Arabian employees of ARAMCO, the Arab American Oil Company. How has oil — its extractive, shiny infrastructures, camps, big men, politics and corporations, its global ecologies — shaped lived environments? Insisting on a feminist and multidisciplinary rearranging of the archive, the book inhabits history-in-the-making as it unfolds in domestic scenes, lived quarters, the affective terrains of oil.
Khayyat’s research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, the Rachel Carson Center. Her writing has appeared in American Ethnologist, Public Culture, JMEWS, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology News, HAU, and a number of edited volumes. Khayyat was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2018-2019). Before joining NYUAD, she taught at the American University in Cairo (2013-2023) and the American University of Beirut (2011-2013). She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University (2013), an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University (1998) and a BA in history (1997) from the American University of Beirut.
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