Iraqibacter: Ecologies of War and an Anthropology of Wounding | Thursday (5/17), 3:30pm SBSG 1321
Department: Global Middle East Studies
Date and Time: May 17, 2018 | 3:30 PM-5:00 PMEvent Location: SBSG 1321
Event Details
Iraq's healthcare has been on the edge of collapse since the 1990s. Once the leading hub of scientific and medical training in the Middle East, Iraq's infrastructure has been undermined by decades of U.S.-led wars, sanctions and invasions. This has been further accentuated by the dearth of empirical knowledge about Iraq in the social sciences, which has often rendered Iraq as ungovernable in swath of scholarship. Building on my ongoing ethnographic research on wounds and wounding, I explore some of the long-term consequences of Iraq’s healthcare dismemberment. I interrogate the rise of Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR) infections among militant and civilians injured in Iraq (and across the region) since the 2003 US-led occupation. I ask: what is revealed in the wound? And focus on the mystery of Iraqibacter, a moniker given to Acinetobacter baumannii—a superbug, defiant of most antibiotics and commonly associated with the Iraq War Veterans in the United States. I show how unravelling ethnographic and microbiological knowledge about Iraqibacter show deeper entanglements of this killer superbug in the political, biosocial, and environmental manifestations of long-term war in the country, and its present-day fallout across the region.
Bio
Omar Dewachi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Social Medicine and Global Health at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Trained as a physician in Iraq during the 1990s, he received his doctorate in social anthropology from Harvard University in 2008. He has conducted extensive fieldwork on the human, social, and environmental impacts of decades of sanctions and military interventions in Iraq—including the exodus of Iraqi doctors, the breakdown of state medical infrastructure, and the long-term toxic legacies of war. He is the author of Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2017), which is the first historical and ethnographic study documenting the rise and fall of state medicine in Iraq. He is currently conducting ethnographic research on the ecologies of wounds and wounding that explores the biosocial life of war wounds and the changing modes of care across the Middle East. The project focuses on examining the different pathways of Anti-Microbial Resistance in war wounds through the experiences of patients, doctors and institutions across the region. He is the author of numerous publications that have appeared in a number of medical, anthropological, and global health journals, including theLancet.