Munira Khayyat

MUNIRA KHAYYAT, then a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and assistant professor at the American University in Cairo, was awarded a Post-PhD Research Grant in April 2019 to aid research on ‘The Life of War: Ecologies of Survival in South Lebanon.’ The project, building on dissertation research conducted in 2007-2008 which was funded by a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, examined ‘resistant ecologies’ of living amidst the violence of war, capitalist extraction, the nation-state, and the ruined worlds these have created and within which many must continue to live. In South Lebanon, an enduring warzone, multispecies alliances such as tobacco farming, goat-herding or tending to the spirits of nature, underwrite resistant life. The funding enabled follow-up field research in the ‘frontline villages’ along the Lebanese-Israeli border where dissertation research was conducted a decade earlier. The fresh data was incorporated in the book manuscript ‘A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon,’ which was published by the University of California Press in 2022.