Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellow
Alaa Attiah Mitwaly is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her research investigates semi-nomadic communities, underground waterways, aquifers, political future imaginations, Muslim metaphysics, militarization and state making. She co-edits the Essential Reading Page from the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) team at the Arab Studies Institute.
Fellowship Project: Sinai Foretellers: Underground Waterways, Warfare, and Wayfarers
Alaa’s research investigates desert environmental imaginaries and power dynamics through its underground sphere. It does so in order to understand alternate modes of sovereignty—“subaltern sovereignty and subterranean sovereignty”—and to grasp marginal environmental knowledges, imaginations and practices in dealing with the underground waterways (aquifers) that can decolonize the dominant environmental imaginaries of deserts in Egypt and the Middle East.