Academic Texts
On this page you can find a selection of academic pieces I have authored and published in recent years. Drawing on my long-term research in Morocco, in these texts I cover topics like urban planning and social housing architectures, the politics of infrastructure development, and gendered experiences of precarious living on the urban margins.
Precarious Modernities: Assembling State, Space, and Society on the Urban Margins in Morocco
My first book is now out with Zed Books/Bloomsbury Press!
“A brilliant anthropology of and in Casablanca’s urban margins. [...] A thoughtful and in-depth study. Highly recommended.”
Activating the Margins through Art: An ethnographic perspective on the work of L’Atelier de l’Observatoire in Casablanca
in Chapter 3 of Le Musée Collectif, un musée citoyen pour la ville de Casablanca
This is my contribution to a volume cataloguing and critically reflecting on the work of Moroccan cultural organization Atelier de l’Observatoire, from an ethnographic perspective. I trace the multiple stagings of a mobile greenhouse installation across Casablanca’s urban margins, and through interviews with artists, inhabitants, and various stakeholders, discuss the impact that such grounded art practices can have on revitalising public memory and collective, participatory archiving of the city’s social history.
‘Commoning the Future’: Sustaining and Contesting the Public Good in North Africa
Introduction to special issue in Journal of North African Studies
with Maryame Amarouche
Struggles over housing, land, and forms of mobility have been mainstays of both academic and popular coverage of North Africa in recent decades. As we firmly enter a period of accelerating crises linked to global forces, it remains important to document and reflect on how these issues are played out through local protests and debates over public goods and shared futures in the region. Our special issue brings renewed attention to existing and emerging practices, ideas, spaces, and actors involved in shaping and contesting both old and new commons, while unearthing different and occasionally competing understandings of the public good.
In the Time of Megaprojects: Classed Temporal Scales along a Moroccan Highspeed-Rail Corridor
In recent years the Moroccan regime has been attracting global and regional investors with the promise of new ‘megaprojects’ that aim to radically transform local natural, economic and social landscapes. Inaugurated in 2018, Morocco’s (and Africa’s) first high-speed rail line (LGV) is considered a flagship project within this landscape.
In this paper I trace the ways in which the introduction of high-speed rail has produced a re-scaling of geographical and temporal relationships of belonging in Morocco. From this exploration scale emerges as a political process of spatiotemporal re-arrangement which can consolidate particular power relations while also providing a conduit for their critique.
Disposable Casablanca: Waste and the Politics of Decay from and for the Urban Margins
In this photo-essay for Etnofoor’s issue on ‘WASTE’, I reflect on the political and strategic ways in which Casablanca’s margins have been made synonymous with disposability and decay. Marginalized and criminalized urban communities are seldom able to respond to or converse with the maligning stereotypes used to depict them.
With the help of images generated by my research interlocutors I foreground the work performed by discourses about the nature and causes of waste and its cognates, specifically in relation to communities on the urban margins. In the process, my goal is to provide a grounded and granular account that responds to and critiques resurgent and reactionary logics and neoliberal aesthetics which associate working-class spaces and practices with disorder, waste and surplus bodies.
Indigenous water management and/as techno-social heritage in Marrakech, Morocco
In this forthcoing contribution to the open access journal Blue Papers, I discuss the creation of Morocco’s first water heritage museum, Aman, Musee pour la civilisation de l’eau, in one of the country’s most arid regions, Marrakech. I explore the historic and socio-technical embeddedness of water structures to assess the mechanisms that have worked in the past and factors that led to their errosion. By examining this contemporary heritage site, we might better understand how, and under the influence of which natural and political factors, stakeholders have changed over time. This is instrumental for (re)connecting water preservation knowledge to local stakeholders and spaces to protect it and make it an agent of inclusive and equitable development.
Dissonant Entanglements and Creative Redistributions
with Judith Naeff et al.
In this chapter commissioned by the Prince Claus Fund, Hivos, and European Cultural Foundation (ECF) we document the experiences of four cultural organizations located in the Middle East and North Africa region: L’Atelier de l’Observatoire (Morocco), Clown Me In (Lebanon), Bantmag (Turkey), and Volunteer Palestine (West Bank). Our research shows that organizations struggle with the need to appeal to international funding bodies while also trying to address in their work the needs of the local communities they serve. We show that, in spite of numerous challenges, cultural actors across the region manage to activate transformative experiences through the force of art.
Casablanca’s Megaprojects: Neoliberal Urban Planning and Socio-Spatial Transformations
with Sanae Aljem
Megaprojects have emerged as the preferred implementation tool of urban upgrading strategies in Morocco. In this article, we examine this development through the case of two large-scale projects in Casablanca, Morocco‘s economic capital. We argue that these changes are as much a result of structural reforms as they are indicative of global and transnational neoliberalisation logics, and we diagnose their impact at the level of policy, planning, and socio-spatial forms.
A Tramway Called Atonement
This article explores the historical genealogies behind recent infrastructure projects in Morocco and how the building of the Casablanca tramway opened up new avenues for political participation for a segment of the city that frequently lacks the direct means for accessing power. Building on this case, I argue for an understanding of infrastructure as a site for the production of future aspirations and political engagement for marginalized communities.
Cartography: Selda Erdem and Torben Dedring.
Losing or Gaining Home? Experiences of Resettlement from Casablanca’s Slums
with Rafael Beier
Part of an edited collection of ethnographies of global urban inequality, in this chapter we give an account of the varied experiences of resettlement experienced by residents of Casablanca’s slums. We show that standardized approaches to dealing with informal housing and urban inequality, such as those adopted by the Moroccan authorities, are not only ineffective in eradicating these problems but likely pro- duce new forms of marginalization and disenfranchisement.
At Home on the Margins
In this article I examine some of the ways in which giving and receiving care on the margins of Casablanca become ambivalently constituted acts inscribed in a context of historical trauma and growing economic insecurity. Within this context I explore the usefulness of “un‐homely” as a conceptual tool for discussing forms of domestic care on the margins of a growing urban center.
Dissenting Poses: Marginal Youth, Viral Aesthetics, and Affective Politics in Neoliberal Morocco
In the spring of 2014, an unprecedented wave of police raids swept over every lower-class (sha‘abi) neighborhood across Morocco. Dubbed “Operation Tcharmil,” the raids targeted young, lower-class men matching viral selfies in which track-suit-wearing teens boastfully displayed status objects and white weapons. In this article I unpack the economic and historical factors that shaped both popular reactions and policing actions toward the sudden, online visibility of a politically and economically disenfranchised group. Overall, I argue that such outbursts can help us better understand and rethink existing notions of class.
Écochard's 8 by 8 housing grid in Morocco
This essay examines a colonial planning and slum resettlement instrument developed by the French in Morocco in the 1950s. The intention is to explore and illuminate the contributions of multiple actors – local and transnational – and to shed light on the complicated entanglements between the production of colonial knowledge, urban spaces, and the postcolonial lives grafted onto them.