Hadeel Badarni

HADEEL BADARNI, then a graduate student at University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, received a grant in April 2022 to aid research on “The Making of ‘High-tech’ Ecologies: The Agricultural Afterlives of Technoscientific Capital in Israel/Palestine,” supervised by Dr. Joseph Masco. This project takes Israel’s rising agricultural technoscience as a site to study settler-colonial modes of environmental subsumption in Palestine. It seeks to explore how certain webs of interest and imaginaries come to weave modes of reasoning and patterns of knowing into industrially operational and prototypical know-how. As civilian forms of military know-how, Israel’s agricultural technologies take legacies and practices of colonial domination as their preconditions and epistemological lifeline. Once military technologies are “proven effective” in Palestinian and “hostile” milieus, subsequent agricultural systems crop up in Israel to replenish supposedly enhanced forms of non-human life. Surveillance gadgets morph into crop monitoring technologies, urban warfare robotics re-emerge as pesticide drones, and a “brain” implanted in large-scale irrigation systems has its original software in Israel’s Iron Dome. What does an ecology-making enterprise entail in so far as it apprehends the natural world militarily? How have lineages of scientific knowability and thresholds of proven “effectiveness” shape Israel’s “high- tech” agriculture? and what is at stake when an entire colony is territorialized into experimental reservoirs for technoscientific efforts to remodel what “world ecology” is and can be?