This course explores the Israeli-Palestine conflict as a history of spatial and environmental transformations by considering the threshold of the Negev desert. This desert edge is a conflict shoreline along which multiple struggles unfold: settlements displace native people in order to make the desert bloom, while climate change desertifies large tracts of formerly agrarian lands. This course investigates the nature of these contemporary conflicts by establishing relations among colonial history, architecture, literature, and climate change and by examining the political, legal, and aesthetic challenges that environmental violence initiates.
