Global Energy Cultures: How Energy Shapes Our Everyday Lives

Sami Hermez (Moderator)

Sami Hermez is the Director of the Liberal Arts Program and an Associate Professor in residence of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar. He is the author of War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (UPenn 2017), which focuses on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon and how people recollect and anticipate this violence, and My Brother, My Land: A Story from Palestine (Stanford 2024), that tells the story of a Palestinian family resisting ongoing Israeli settler colonialism. His next project remains top secret and will only be explained for now should you meet him in person. His broader research concerns include the study of social movements, the state, the future, memory, violence, and critical security in the Arab World. He has held posts as a visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, University of Pittsburgh’s Visiting Professor of Contemporary International Issues, a visiting professor of anthropology at Mt. Holyoke College, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Lebanese Studies, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University.

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Noura Alkhalili

Noura Alkhalili is an Assistant Professor in Human Geography at the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Her research expertise spans over three areas. The first area engages with renewable energy studies, energy transitions in North Africa, energy export between North Africa and Europe, green extractivism, occupied territories, and energy justice in the MENA region. The second area lies at the intersection of critical and political geography, urban studies, and settler-colonial studies with a focus on Palestine. The third area draws upon postcolonial, decolonial, and anti-colonial theories in relation to debates on the decolonization of knowledge production and the university. Noura’s work has appeared in different journals such as Political Geography, Antipode and Settler Colonial Studies.

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Muna Dajani

Muna Dajani is currently a Fellow in Environment at the Geography and Environment Department at LSE. Previously, she held the position of Senior Research Associate at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University where she worked on enhancing joint learning on the project entitled, “Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability”, which explored promising grassroots initiatives of holistic groundwater governance, shedding light on traditional and intergenerational skills and knowledge(s). Her work at the University of East Anglia’s Water Security Research Centre (2016-2021) focused on their Upper Jordan and Yarmouk Hydropolitical Baseline reports, both exploring highly contested and politicized transboundary river basins. She has published papers in Political Geography, Antipode, Environment and Planning E, and Water Alternatives. She also led publications of non-academic books such as “The Ethical Guide to Consumerism in Palestine” (2015 and 2021), and policy briefs on water and climate change politics (Al-Shabaka Palestinian Policy Network, Jadaliyya, Minority Rights Group).

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Mazin Qumsiyeh

Mazin Qumsiyeh teaches and does research at Bethlehem and Birzeit Universities. He is founder and volunteer director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) at Bethlehem University which includes a botanical garden and a natural history museum. He has published over 150 scientific papers and several books on topics ranging from cultural heritage to human rights to biodiversity conservation to cancer. He has also published hundreds of articles and letters to the editor. He serves on the board of a number of Palestinian youth and service organizations and oversees many projects related to the sustainability of human and natural communities.