Extreme Heat: Environments of Conflict
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Extreme Heat: Environments of Conflict
Virtual Symposium
Fri, Oct 2 & Sat, Oct 3
9 am–12 pm ET
Register Here
The entanglement of conflict and environmental change is undeniable. Yet, for the most part, their relationship remains depoliticized and overlooked in international debates on climate change. Likewise, the bio-ecological violence of conflict, its forms, scales, and cascading force, whether immediate and visible or slow and imperceptible, are left out of mainstream geopolitical narrations. Meanwhile, there are numerous theories about how environmental stress, exacerbated by climate change and spatial violence, has become a powerful force shaping politics, social relations, and new patterns of settlement in the twenty-first century.
Organized by Assistant Professor of Urban + Environmental Planning Ghazal Jafari, this symposium invites scholars and storytellers concerned with conflict zones, urban peripheries, black market geographies, migration corridors, and war ecologies in West Asia to countermap the landscapes and environments of conflict. It aims to transcend the geopolitical oversimplifications and propagandist mechanisms of censorship, to reveal the complexities and contradictions of conflicts, and to foreground collective survival, resurgence, and self-determination outside the frame of international geopolitics.
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Schedule
Panel 1 // Fri, Oct 2
9 AM–12 PM ET
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| Extreme Heat Panelists, Day 1 (left–right): Ghazal Jafari, Nishat Awan, Hiba Bou Akar, Samaneh Moafi, and Esra Sarıoğlu (Moderator) | ||||
Speakers
Ghazal Jafari, Assistant Professor of Urban + Environmental Planning, University of Virginia
Nishat Awan, Professor of Architecture and Visual Culture, University College London
Hiba Bou Akar, Associate Professor of Urban Planning, Columbia University, GSAPP
Samaneh Moafi, Assistant Director, Forensic Architecture
Moderator
Esra Sarıoğlu, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia
Panel 2 // Sat, Oct 3
9 AM–12 PM ET
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| Extreme Heat Panelists, Day 2 (left–right) Kali Rubaii, Bridget Guarasci, Sana Chavoshian, Asma Mehan, and Tessa Farmer (Moderator) | ||||
Speakers
Kali Rubaii, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Purdue University
Bridget Guarasci, Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology, Franklin and Marshall College
Sana Chavoshian, Research Fellow, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
Asma Mehan, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Texas Tech University
Moderator
Tessa Farmer, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies, University of Virginia
About the Speakers
Dr. Nishat Awan is an architect researching the intersection of geopolitics and space, including questions related to diasporas, migration and borders. Her research and practice bring together digital, ethnographic and field-based approaches in often contested geographies. Her writing develops work on digital witnessing as spatial practice in the context of humanitarian responses to violence and conflict. Her most recent publications include the forthcoming edited volume, Atlas Otherwise (Actar, 2026), based on long-term artistic research on borders and migration, and the co-edited book Architectures of Resistance (Leuven University Press, 2024). Additionally, she is author of Diasporic Agencies (Routledge, 2016) and co-author of Spatial Agency (Routledge, 2011). Her work has been exhibited at Nieuwe Instituut, Istanbul Biennale, Busan Museum of Modern Art and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, amongst others. Currently, she is Professor of Architecture and Visual Culture at University College London, Urban Laboratory.
Dr. Hiba Bou Akar is an Associate Professor in the Urban Planning program at Columbia GSAPP. Her research focuses on planning in conflict and post-conflict cities, the question of urban security and violence, and the role of religious political organizations in the making of cities. Bou Akar’s book, For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers, published by Stanford University Press in 2018, examines how Beirut’s post-civil war peripheries have been transformed through multiple planning exercises into contested frontiers that are mired in new forms of conflict. Her first co-edited book, Narrating Beirut from its Borderlines, published by Heinrich Böll in 2011, incorporated ethnographic and archival research with art installations, architecture, graphic design, and photography to explore Beirut’s segregated geographies. Currently, Bou Akar is working on a new project entitled Sedimentary Urbanization, for which she received the 2019 Rockefeller Foundation Academic Writing fellowship.
Dr. Sana Chavoshian is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin and Associate Researcher at the Centre for Advance Studies “Multiple Secularities: Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” in Leipzig University. Chavoshian’s research focuses on war- and sanction-ecologies in Iran and Iraq, exploring how material and affective environments shape atmospheres and unsettle boundaries between religion, politics, and everyday life. She investigates how these landscapes of wars invoke, stage and orchestrate new forms of collective memory, dreamscape, and resistance through embodied experiences and sensory (olfactory, auratic and haptic) relations to the environment. Chavoshian is the author of Women, Martyrs and Stones in Iran’s Post-War Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2025)
Dr. Bridget Guarasci examines the violence of wartime value transformation of species, territory, and natural resources that expands extractive frontiers. Her Warzone Ecology: The Violence of Planetary Repair in Iraq (University of California Press, 2026) examines how biodiversity conservation of Iraq’s historic marshlands during the era of US occupation and UN reconstruction facilitated multinational extraction of water and oil within its geological field.
Dr. Asma Mehan is an Assistant Professor at the Huckabee College of Architecture, Texas Tech University, USA, and Director of the Architectural Humanities and Urbanism Lab (AHU_Lab). She is also Editor-in-Chief of plaNext: Next Generation Planning. Her research bridges architectural humanities, critical urban studies, industrial heritage, adaptive reuse, public space, climate resilience, and spatial justice. She is the author of four books, including Kuala Lumpur: Community, Infrastructure, and Urban Inclusivity (Routledge, 2020), Tehran: From Sacred to Radical (Routledge, 2022), The Affective Agency of Public Space (De Gruyter Brill, 2024), and Decolonizing Industrial Heritage (Edward Elgar, 2026). She has also edited After Oil: A Comparative Analysis of Oil Heritage, Urban Transformations, and Resilience Paradigms (Springer, 2025) and City, Public Space, and Body (Routledge, 2025), advancing comparative debates on post-industrial urban futures, public space, embodiment, and resilience.
Dr. Samaneh Moafi is Assistant Director of Research at Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London. She provides conceptual and methodological oversight across projects investigating human rights violation and environmental harm. She is a Trustee of the Mosaic Room and 2026-27 Geddes Visiting Fellow at ESALA. Before joining FA, Moafi practiced as an architect in Australia, taught BA Architecture at the University of Technology, Sydney, MArch Urban Design at the Bartlett School, University College, London, and led a number of short courses at the Royal College of Arts and the AA.
Dr. Kali Rubaii is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University. Her research focuses on displacement, war-impacted ecologies, and environmental health justice. Through forensic ethnography, Rubaii’s work bears witness to the violent material impact of extractive industry and war on people’s lives. She is currently leading two interdisciplinary projects: she is working with a team of doctors, epidemiologists, and environmental activists to document the links between birth anomalies and military environmental damage in Fallujah, Iraq. She is also researching concrete production in post-invasion Iraq as it enforces global regimes of class and citizenship. Kali is the author of Resurgency: Outlasting the War on Terror in Iraq (Duke University Press, 2026), and co-editor of The Social Properties of Concrete (Punctum, 2025).
Organizer
Dr. Ghazal Jafari is an environmental justice scholar and ecological urbanist of Persian and Azeri descent. Her creative work and scholarship intersect multispecies environmental justice, Indigenous landscape epistemologies, feminist liberation, infrastructural politics, displacements, and political self-determination in conflict zones and constructed peripheries. Her current book project investigates the clash between landscapes of coercion and ecologies of survival in Iran-Iraq borderlands. She is a co-author of A Botany of Violence: Across 529 Years of Resistance and Resurgence (ORO Editions, 2022), and co-editor of New Geographies 9: Post Human (Actar and Harvard University Press, 2018). Her creative work has been exhibited internationally, including the traveling exhibition A Flora of the Future, which was featured at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 and later at UVA School of Architecture in 2022. She is an Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia.
Moderators
Dr. Tessa Farmer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Global Studies Program at the University of Virginia. Her first book, Well-Connected: Everyday Water Practices in Cairo (2023), focuses on water and wastewater in Cairo, Egypt. She has a second book manuscript and digital project underway on charitable water fountains (sabils) that are an important part of the built environment and moral ecology of Cairo, and an ongoing research collaboration with the Athar Lina Initiative on water reuse and urban agriculture in the al-Khalifa neighborhood of Cairo. Farmer received her MA (2007) and PhD (2014) in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Esra Sarıoğlu is a scholar of gender and globalization. Her work explores the ways in which emotions, bodies, and embodiment blend with markets, institutions, and systems as broad as global capitalism and sexism in the Global South. Her first book, The Body Unburdened: Violence, Emotions, and the New Woman in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2022) examines political forces and historical processes through a feminist lens, revealing an ensemble of emotional and embodied processes that invigorate Turkey’s neoliberal urban economy, women’s sociality and activism, as well as authoritarian politics. The book won the American Sociological Association's Body and Embodiment Section Best Book Award (2023).
Supported by the UVA Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation.
