Toxic Supply Chains of War in Iraq
This event is intended for K-14 teachers rather than a general audience and is funded by the Department of Education’s Title VI National Resource Center grant program.
Taking war as a toxic structure, this talk begins at the belly of war, in Fallujah, Iraq — one of the most heavily bombarded cities in Iraq. Based on Rubaii’s ethnographic fieldwork between 2014 and 2023, the talk traces weaponized metals from the sand and bodies of children in Fallujah back to their origins at war’s jaws: mineral mines in the DR Congo, where such metals are extracted by artisanal miners for use by tech and weapons companies. The talk also follows the post-battle life of weaponized metals to its tail, where these metals are recycled by Indian laborers in steel factories in Iraqi Kurdistan as a central part of the concrete industry, or where they are destroyed in burn pits in Colfax, Louisiana. At each site, people are trapped in biochemically and socially toxic relations with components of weaponized earth. By tracing the toxic exposures people face at multiple sites of metal extraction, weaponization, reuse, and disposal, this talk identifies two key points in war’s long chain of supply: 1) it identifies the many bodies and people whose lives are ravaged by warfare far from the site and dates of documented battles, and 2) it pinpoints locations in which further research may identify forensic sites of intervention in an increasingly diffuse network of corporate and contracted war-making.
Speaker
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Dr. Kali Rubaii Dr. Kali Rubaii is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Purdue University. Her work focuses on displacement, health justice, and the environmental impacts of war. Through forensic ethnography along the supply chains of war, Rubaii documents the long-term material impacts of extractive industry and military violence on people’s lives. She is leading three projects on 1) how Iraq’s concrete industry is instrumental to militarized privatization in post-war reconstruction, 2) how displaced communities travel to and from their land during episodes of military violence, and 3) how the epidemic of congenital anomalies in Fallujah is understood as a figure of long-term, intergenerational toxification.