Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard
Date and Time
Location
Pastoral Warfare: Animals as Weapons of Israel’s Settler Ecologies
Speaker
- Irus Braverman, SUNY Distinguished Professor and the Teresa Miller Professor of Law, University at Buffalo, SUNY.
Chair
- Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies; Professor of Environmental Science and Public Policy, Committee on Degrees in Environmental Science and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.
Contact
Tenzin Dadak
tdadak@hks.harvard.edu
Abstract
Across history, nonhuman animals have not only sustained human societies but also advanced projects of conquest and colonization. This study draws on ethnographic and archival methodologies to trace how Israeli settlers deploy sheep as agents of expansion in the occupied West Bank. Developing the concepts ecopastoralism and sheepwashing, I explore how large-scale land appropriation and violence through seemingly benevolent acts of sheep grazing have enabled settlers to simultaneously cast themselves as the just ecological and spiritual stewards of this land. By analyzing sheep (as well as dogs, donkeys, and crocodiles) as instruments of both conquest and care in Palestine-Israel, the study illuminates how nonhuman life and death are evaluated and mobilized within settler colonial regimes of belonging and elimination.
Bio
Irus Braverman is a SUNY Distinguished Professor and the Teresa Miller Professor of Law at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, where she is also an adjunct professor of geography and a research professor in the Department of Environment and Sustainability. Trained as a prosecutor and an environmental lawyer, her interdisciplinary scholarship examines the intersections of nature, science, and politics, with a focus on environmental and climate justice, settler ecologies, ocean legalities, and the governance of more-than-human life. Braverman has authored and edited thirteen books and published more than one hundred articles and book chapters across law, geography, anthropology, and the environmental humanities. Her recent monograph, Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel (2023), received the Clay Morgan Award for Best Book in Environmental Political Theory from the Western Political Science Association.