Unpacking Climate Change in the Middle East

Word Count: 331

by Dr Edna Bonhomme
Monthly Exclusives

In December 2019, Stillpoint Magazine visited Stillpoint Spaces Berlin to host the symposium event Racism & Ecology: An Afternoon with Stillpoint Magazine. Below is a recording of Dr Edna Bonhomme’s presentation “Unpacking Climate Change in the Middle East”, which coincided with her contribution to Stillpoint Magazine Issue 003: FALLOW.

“The climate crisis impacts us all, but not in the same way. Since the rise of industrialization, inorganic toxins, temperature increase, and drought have integrated themselves into our food, water, and bodies—with some compounds assimilating into our flora and fauna. There has been considerable debates about waste and the extent it is created and the health impacts it has, especially with respect to (post)colonial settings. This presentation seeks to understand how colonialism and neoliberalism has left toxic residues in the Global South-with an emphasis on the African continent-and how it plague communities by producing chronic diseases, new hierarchies of life, and new social formations.”

~ Edna Bonhomme


DR. EDNA BONHOMME speaker

Edna Bonhomme is a historian and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science. She earned her PhD in the history of science at Princeton University in 2017.  Her dissertation, Plagued Bodies and Spaces: Medicine, Trade, and Death in Egypt and Tunisia, 1500-1804 CE, explored the history of epidemics, trade, and funeral rites in North Africa and the Middle East. She co-created Decolonization in Action, a podcast series that explores the ways that decoloniality is understood and put into practice by artists, researchers, and activists.

For more information on Racism & Ecology, you can download the event leaflet here.

© Copyright for all texts published in Stillpoint Magazine are held by the authors thereof, and for all visual artworks by the visual artists thereof, effective from the year of publication. Stillpoint Magazine holds copyright to all additional images, branding, design and supplementary texts across stillpointmag.org as well as in additional social media profiles, digital platforms and print materials. All rights reserved.