Elements of Border and Infrastructure: Fire I
November 17, 2021/ 12:30 pm EST/ Link for Registration
Fire is the opposite of static. At once a constant presence in our world and a manifestation of continual ongoing transformation. Our world changes through fire, and it is a force we have constantly sought to tend, control, and channel -- arguably it is the catalyst for all infrastructures coming into being. In this panel we will gather together experts on the efforts to tend fire, heat, and electricity in the Eastern Mediterranean to ask them to consider the long range (and often vain) efforts of humanity to channel energy into and with infrastructure, and across national and regional borders. We invite our speakers to consider the ways power dynamics are interlaced through those efforts, and the effects of the manifold ways fire, heat, and energy exceed them.
Please join the Hagop Kevorkian Center for our fourth event in our Virtual Series "Elements of Border and Infrastructure" featuring a discussion on "Fire" with On Barak (Tel Aviv University), Joanne Randa Nucho (Pomona College), and Eleni Myrivili (City of Athens).
This event is free, but registration is needed: bit.ly/Fire112021
On Barak is a social and cultural historian of science and technology in non-Western settings. He is an Associate Professor at the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, and the author of three books: Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (University of California Press, 2020), On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (University of California Press, 2013), and Names Without Faces: From Polemics to Flirtation in an Islamic Chat-Room (Uppsala University Press, 2006).
Joanne Randa Nucho is an anthropologist and filmmaker. Her research interests include critical infrastructure studies, urban studies and environmental inequality, as well as non-fiction film and video and visual ethnography.
Eleni Myrivili is the first Athens' - and Europe’s- Chief Heat Officer. Dr Myrivili was elected in City Government and served as Athens Deputy Mayor for Urban Nature and Climate Resilience (2014-2019). She then spent a year at Harvard University as a Loeb Fellow '20. Currently she is an Advisor to the Mayor of Athens on Resilience and Sustainability and Senior Fellow for the Arsht-Rockefeller Resilience Centre of the Atlantic Council in Washington. She co-chairs the Global Steering Committee of the Resilient Cities Network and holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Columbia University and has taught for many years at the University of the Aegean in Greece.
Co-sponsored by: NYU's Center for European and Mediterranean Studies
Accommodation requests related to a disability should be sent to kevorkian.center@nyu.edu by November 3rd, 2021. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill requests. Also be advised that this Zoom event will be recorded and made available after the event on our Youtube page.