Inscribing New Infrastructural Relations into the World: Deborah Cowen and Laleh Khalili in Conversation Available to Purchase

Wesley Attewell is assistant professor of political geography at the University of Hong Kong. As a geographer of imperialism, decolonization, and diaspora, Wesley studies the global landscapes of US empire building from the Cold War into the present. His forthcoming book Developing Violence: Disassembling the USAID Complex in Afghanistan has been reviewed as a rich account of how the US transformed post-1945 Afghanistan into a key site for reimagining development into a liberal form of counterinsurgency. Wesley is currently working on a second book that maps the transpacific logistics infrastructures and the racialized labor regimes that the US assembled to supply its war in Vietnam.

Emily Mitchell-Eaton is assistant professor of geography at Colgate University. A feminist geographer interested in the politics of mobility and migration, she explores how racial meanings, laws and policies, military infrastructures, and emotions travel through space and over time. Her book New Destinations of Empire: Transpacific Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Imperial Citizenship (forthcoming) examines the US empire’s long-standing effects on the Marshall Islands and its role in producing a Marshallese imperial diaspora that stretches to northwest Arkansas. Her work has been published in Political Geography; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space; International Migration Review; Gender, Place and Culture; and the edited volume Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship (2021).

Richard Nisa is special faculty in the IDeATe Program at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is the program lead in sustainability. He was previously an associate professor of geography in the Department of Social Sciences and History at Fairleigh Dickinson University. His current book project explores the transnational circulatory, political, and technological systems that constitute US-managed wartime detainment spaces. His work has been published in the Journal of Historical Geography, Environment and Planning A, and the edited volume Algorithmic Life: Calculative Devices in the Age of Big Data (2016).

Deborah Cowen teaches in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. Their work is concerned with the intimate life of war in ostensibly civilian spaces, the logistics of supply chain and racial capitalism, and the contested geographies of settler colonial infrastructure. Author of The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (2014) and Military Workfare: The Soldier and Social Citizenship in Canada (2008), Deborah also coedited War, Citizenship, Territory (with Emily Gilbert, 2008) and Digital Life in the Global City: Contesting Infrastructures (with Alexis Mitchell, Emily Paradis, and Brett Story, 2008) and, with Katherine McKittrick and Simone Browne, coedits the Duke University Press book series Errantries.

Laleh Khalili is Al-Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies at Exeter University and author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (2007), Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (2013), and Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (2020). She is currently working on a project on the entanglements of oil in every aspect of modern life.