Scratch-and-sniff Palestine: How olfaction shapes nonsovereign infrastructural spaces

Abstract

This article makes two related arguments. First, that the continuum of hazards that people can experience in relation to waste infrastructures can include unstable epistemic and political positionings of olfaction, alongside other impingements of human excrement such as toxicity to the human body and damage to ecologies. I show this by paying attention to how people are sensitized to smell and by paying attention to how diverse forms of scientific measurement have responded to embodied attunements under nonsovereign conditions in Palestine. Second, I argue that olfaction can be key to shaping infrastructures’ specific trajectories while also creating open-ended possibilities for the making of political subjects and futures. In Palestine, olfaction is an object of interpretation, a sensory tool for interpretation, and a shifting marker of belonging to different types of collectivities. Holding one’s real or proverbial nose—or not—contributes to the conditions that facilitate or preempt livability there. This article draws on fieldwork among Palestinian environmentalists, Palestinian Authority bureaucrats, and municipal employees between 2007 and 2017 to show how human bodies—and their interpreted and interpretive attunements—must figure in our investigations of infrastructural spaces in the Middle East and beyond.

Weathering violence: Atmospheric materialities and olfactory durations of ‘skunk water’ in Palestine

“…Secondly, the focus on the materiality of the skunk water aims to describe the operations of yet another repulsive colonial tool aiming to weather the colonised population, and their everyday material/aerial environs (see Griffiths, 2022; Povinelli, 2016; Stamatopoulus-Robbins, 2022). Indeed, the use of the tool should be seen as part of a longer colonial history of producing the ‘filthy’ and ‘smelly Others’ (and the various violent attempts to then ‘sanitise’ them) not only through ‘racist representations’ (eg.…”

“…Within the existing geographical literature, the notion of smell has been approached from sporadic angles, ranging from scent technologies (Kitson and McHugh, 2019) and art gallery spaces (Straughan, 2015) to geographies of waste infrastructure (Chan, 2020; Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2022), albeit most commonly olfaction has been acknowledged by incorporating it to more generic references on ‘multisensory’ experiences, encounters, and engagements with one's surroundings (eg. Bell, 2019; Gökariksel and Secor, 2022; Pyyry, 2019).…”

Gaza: A decolonial geography

“…Across this work, a detailed picture of spatial segregation emerges, or specifically how colonial space is multiple and mutable. Depending on which parts of Palestine they live in, Palestinians are severely restricted in movement (Griffiths & Repo, 2020, 2021; Hammami, 2015, 2019; Rijke & Minca, 2018, 2019; Tawil‐Souri, 2009, 2017); facing forced displacements and demolitions of their homes (Harker, 2009; Joronen & Griffiths, 2019; Shalhoub‐Kevorkian, 2009); under the surveillance of settler civil society (Griffiths, 2023; Medien, 2023); caught within uncertain bureaucratic and juridical processes (Berda, 2017; Joronen, 2017b); military practices of (non) ‘ethical’ operations (Jones, 2023; Puar, 2017); de‐development (Roy, 1999; Smith, 2016); infrastructure and practices of urban land grabbing (Alkhalili, 2017a, 2017b; Alkhalili et al., 2014; Joudah, 2020; Porter & Yiftachel, 2017; Salamanca & Silver, 2022); an assault on the animating function of hope and future (Abu Hatoum, 2021; Amir, 2021; Hassouna, 2024; Meneley, 2021); the more‐than‐human geographies of subjugation (Bishara et al., 2021; Braverman, 2021, 2023; Griffiths, 2022; Joronen, 2023; Stamatopoulou‐Robbins, 2022); and a general suppression of Palestinian political and cultural expression (Alqaisiya, 2018; Järvi, 2023). If here we are reference‐heavy, it is in the service of collating reading resources that can contribute to a decolonial politics that is informed through robust geographical inquiry.…”

Infrastructural politics in the Middle East and North Africa: Pasts, presents, futures

“…Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins’ (2022) article invites us to see people’s bodily attunement to smell as an integral part of building or unmaking of infrastructure in order to consider the role of sense and human bodies in the (un)making of waste infrastructure and its politics. Stamatopoulou-Robbins explains that olfaction in Palestine is a high-stakes sensorial process that shapes the political possibilities ranging from a longer-term process of waste infrastructure construction designed to serve a future Palestinian state to a more immediate relief from inundation by raw sewage.…”