Books by Emily McKee
Land disputes in Israel are most commonly described as stand-offs between distinct groups of Arab... more Land disputes in Israel are most commonly described as stand-offs between distinct groups of Arabs and Jews. In Israel's southern region, the Negev, Jewish and Bedouin Arab citizens and governmental bodies contest access to land for farming, homes, and industry and struggle over the status of unrecognized Bedouin villages. "Natural," immutable divisions, both in space and between people, are too frequently assumed within these struggles.
Dwelling in Conflict offers the first study of land conflict and environment based on extensive fieldwork within both Arab and Jewish settings. It explores planned towns for Jews and for Bedouin Arabs, unrecognized villages, and single-family farmsteads, as well as Knesset hearings, media coverage, and activist projects. Emily McKee sensitively portrays the impact that dividing lines—both physical and social—have on residents. She investigates the political charge of people's everyday interactions with their environments and the ways in which basic understandings of people and "their" landscapes drive political developments. While recognizing deep divisions, McKee also takes seriously the social projects that residents engage in to soften and challenge socio-environmental boundaries. Ultimately, Dwelling in Conflict highlights opportunities for boundary crossings, revealing both contemporary segregation and the possible mutability of these dividing lines in the future.
Journal Articles and Chapters by Emily McKee
Routledge Companion on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 2022
Despite widespread narratives of water wars, there is no straight line between water scarcity and... more Despite widespread narratives of water wars, there is no straight line between water scarcity and conflict. Rather, water scarcity is shaped by inequitable distribution, the domination of water by some at the expense of others. This chapter surveys the current situation of water access across Israel and Palestine and addresses key historical and recent developments that have raised the stakes of water within socio-political relations and created wide inequities in water access between Palestinians and Israelis. In this region, power has mediated water access through forms of governance, such as colonialism; through technology, such as diversion canals and desalination plants; and through ideologies, such as arguments for cost recovery and centralized control in the face of scarcity. The chapter gives readers the tools to understand the interconnectedness of water use with political flashpoints in Palestine and Israel in particular, and it offers a rich case study for readers of comparative water-related conflicts around the world.
Human Organization, 2023
In this article, I examine the role of applied anthropology in coping with common water managemen... more In this article, I examine the role of applied anthropology in coping with common water management dilemmas and in facilitating more equitable water management. Field research and interviews with Palestinian residents and water managers between 2012–2020 illuminate deep disagreements about two commonly used management tools: full-cost recovery pricing reforms and supply expansion through emerging water technologies. This case demonstrates that not only are there limits to the transportability of solutions across societies, but even within a society and among seemingly similar stakeholders, fundamental disagreement exists about a place’s water priorities and proper interventions. How do we explain the multiplicity of ways in which people seemingly of the same social group approach a single water issue? The article demonstrates an anthropological approach to understanding water use that draws political ecology’s focus on power together with attention to the intersectionality of peoples’ relationships to water. This approach can help water managers acknowledge the political impacts of purportedly apolitical management approaches, and it provides the basis for a more robust incorporation of diverse residents’ priorities into water management decision making.
Journal of Palestine Studies, 2022
Expanding on political ecology analyses that are increasingly applied to water-related challenges... more Expanding on political ecology analyses that are increasingly applied to water-related challenges, this essay calls for greater attention to the political and social consequences of proposed water solutions. Concern about environmental health in Palestine often highlights a lack of water access, with proposed solutions focusing on increasing water supplies. Drawing on fieldwork in the West Bank, northern Israel, and Tel Aviv, this essay compares how differently situated residents and water managers evaluate the potential impacts of one type of supply-side infrastructure: desalination. This comparison counters avowedly apolitical technical evaluations of such initiatives by showing uneven sociopolitical costs and benefits.
Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 2021
Why, with local food’s rising popularity, do small-scale farmers report declining sales? This stu... more Why, with local food’s rising popularity, do small-scale farmers report declining sales? This study used a mix of survey and interview methods to examine the priorities and buying habits of food shoppers in one midsized, lower-income metropolitan area of the U.S. Midwest. The study focuses on individual consumers’ decision-making because it aims to be useful, in particular, to small-scale farmers and advocates of their participation in local and regional food systems. Among shoppers’ stated priorities, the survey found broad support for local food and relatively low competition between price and local origin as purchasing priorities. However, findings also show an attitude-behavior gap, with only a limited increase in tendency among self-defined “local” shoppers to purchase from locally oriented venues. As explanation for this attitude-behavior gap, survey and interview data point to differential definitions of “local food” and situational barriers (primarily inconvenience and lack of variety) preventing shoppers from buying local food. One factor offsetting these barriers was past experience growing one’s own food. Study findings are used to identify particular avenues for intervention by farmers, eaters, and other food systems builders to broaden access to local food through adjustments to marketing strategies, better alignment of wholesale outlets’ practices with the priorities of farmers and eaters, and improved public education about the food system.
McKee, Emily. 2021. “Where Do ‘Localphiles’ Shop?: A Mixed-Methods Case Study of Food-Buying Habits.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 10 (2): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2021.102.023.
Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2021
This article draws lessons about environmental justice from a case study in the Jordan River Vall... more This article draws lessons about environmental justice from a case study in the Jordan River Valley of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Building on notions of justice as recognition, the article argues that inclusive environmental justice agendas require the recognition of multiply marginal-ized groups and the fundamentally different understandings of environmental hazards and benefits they may have, and it proposes the use of intersectional analysis to do so. The village of al-Auja faces severe water-related challenges: a closed Israeli military zone blocking access to the Jordan River, which has also shrunk and grown polluted in recent decades; water wells with declining capacity and increasing salinity and a lack of permits to rehabilitate them; and the drying of a once-perennial spring. Residents, local government officials, and Palestinian staff members of a transborder nongovernmental organization agreed in identifying Israeli occupation as a key cause of water stress and articulated justice-based protests. However, while some emphasized the lack of Palestinian sovereignty over natural resources, others concentrated on the obstruction of villagers' agricultural livelihoods and household hardships. The article demonstrates that different life experiences, particularly along lines of rural/urban residence, career, and gender, shaped divergent definitions among Palestinians of environmental benefits and harms, and thus different priorities for environmental justice work. It suggests that attending to complex, intersecting lines of social experience in the early stage of environmental campaigns, when defining problems and forming goals for improvement, can lead to more representative reparation plans, institution building, and activist agendas.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2019
This article interprets the meanings and motivations of refusal to pay water bills within a con... more This article interprets the meanings and motivations of refusal to pay water bills within a context of fragmented sovereignty. Residents of a village in the occupied Palestinian West Bank call for solutions to water shortages and failed infrastructure, but do so amidst capricious power, where would‐be sovereigns evade accountability. Lacking avenues for direct engagement with authorities, residents speak in generalized ethical terms of their legitimate water claims, and they resort to bill refusal. Setting villagers’ bill refusals within the broader set of interactions between would‐be sovereigns and subjects, this article contributes to anthropological scholarship on refusal by demonstrating how it can be a way of not only dismantling state power, but also summoning a responsible sovereign. Furthermore, it highlights how common dilemmas faced by refusers – dismissal and co‐optation – can be exacerbated by the same evasive accountability against which they protest.
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2018
** Draft Version of article published in International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2018 **
A... more ** Draft Version of article published in International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2018 **
As activists frame campaigns, their region’s broader cultural and political context intercedes. In Israel and Palestine attempts to work across national lines and undertake activism that links ecological, economic, and social issues have long been stymied. This article examines how the fraught historical and contemporary relationships of Israelis and Palestinians with land bestow both flexibility and limitations on their framing of campaigns. In particular, it ethnographically analyzes the framing of two projects—the building of an “eco-mosque” and a Jordan River restoration effort—to examine how activists grapple with frame flexibility and its limits. It finds that an Israeli tendency to deterritorialize environmental issues and curb environmental campaigns that are “too political” conflicts with Palestinian criticism of apolitical frames because they euphemize violence and domination. These cases demonstrate how local connotations can make or break environmental campaigns. The eco-adage, “Think global, act local” is not enough. One must think local, too.
Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment, 2018
From the vantage point of northern Illinois, this article considers how the availability of organ... more From the vantage point of northern Illinois, this article considers how the availability of organic, heirloom, and other specialty foods through a wider variety of grocery stores and online venues is affecting local food systems. Farmers concerned about these new forms of competition develop coping strategies to woo customers, but many of these strategies demand new skill sets and drain farmers’ time and resources away from the fields. How sustainable are local food systems when small-scale farmers must be not only skilled producers, but marketing gurus, gregarious spokespeople, and public educators as well? More contextually grounded qualitative and mixed-methods research is needed to help local food advocates and farmers understand and ease this entrepreneurial treadmill. [local food systems, direct market agriculture, small-scale farmers, competition, United States]
Current Anthropology, 2015
McKee, Emily. 2015. “Trash Talk: Interpreting Morality and Disorder in Negev/Naqab Landscapes.” C... more McKee, Emily. 2015. “Trash Talk: Interpreting Morality and Disorder in Negev/Naqab Landscapes.” Current Anthropology 56 (5): 733-52.
In contexts of land conflict and deep social divisions, evaluations of dirty and disordered landscapes carry social and political weight. This article employs a “political dwelling” perspective in southern Israel to examine how links between Bedouin character, litter and disorder, and lawlessness have become widespread, even naturalized, among many government officials and Jewish residents and even some Bedouin Arab residents. Contemporary trash talk draws on, but simultaneously masks, a history of state-building projects that employed Orientalist evaluations of order and disorder and segregationist approaches to development. While this masking of social construction is a property of all symbolically powerful social distinctions, I argue that the distinctions undergirding trash talk are especially accessible for normalization because of the language of nature within which they are expressed—natural landscapes, ethnic groups, and human nature. As a result, trash talk naturalizes links between dirty places, disorderly people, and the need to remove (or reform) them. This trash talk has profound emotional and material consequences for Bedouin residents of Israel because the discourse makes it easier for many within mainstream Israeli society to treat Bedouin Arabs themselves as matter out of place and to justify various acts of social control.
Nomadic Peoples, Jan 2015
This article examines how social preferences, in the form of cultural politics, become concretise... more This article examines how social preferences, in the form of cultural politics, become concretised in land laws. In Israel, Bedouin Arabs in unrecognised villages and Jewish farmers of individual farmsteads each faced governmental eviction orders and responded by seeking recognition of their land-use practices as legal. However, whereas Jewish farmers successfully mobilised place-based identities to gain legalisation, Bedouin Arabs’ dwelling practices were not recognised as the legitimate basis for land claims and their attempts to assert place-based identities have been denied. Instead, Bedouin Arabs faced pressures of ‘de-cultural accommodation’ and continued evictions. Ethnographic comparison of these two cases of ‘illegal’ settlement demonstrates how cultural identities – as former nomads or pioneer farmers – matter for land claims.
Antipode, 2014
Through ethnographic and historical analysis of the Negev region of Israel, this article examines... more Through ethnographic and historical analysis of the Negev region of Israel, this article examines competitive planting as a common tool in land conflicts. In a context of disputed land ownership, some Bedouin Arab residents plant crops in defiance of government policy. Government enforcers of land-use regulations destroy many of these crops and engage in counterinsurgent tree-planting. I suggest that planting is such a potent tactic because it draws on “environmental idioms” of agricultural labor, the root- edness of trees, and a fundamental Jewish-Arab opposition that have been central to the development of both Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms. For Bedouin Arabs, whose relationship to both nationalisms has long been contested, the multivalent symbolism of planting makes it a particularly promising tactic for asserting land claims. Further, I contend that these plantings demonstrate both the power of environmental idioms to structure land claims along ethnic lines and the creative potential of participants to challenge dominant environmental discourses by adding new connotations.
McKee, Emily. 2013. “Traveling Between Reluctant Neighbors: Researching with Jews and Bedouin Ara... more McKee, Emily. 2013. “Traveling Between Reluctant Neighbors: Researching with Jews and Bedouin Arabs in the Northern Negev.” In Ethnographic Encounters in Israel, edited by Fran Markowitz, 137–55. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Collaborative Anthropologies, 2010
While conducting fieldwork with environmental justice activists in the Negev region of Israel, I ... more While conducting fieldwork with environmental justice activists in the Negev region of Israel, I faced a troubling dilemma regarding representations: Having observed strategic essentialism in activist publicity, how should I uphold both scholarly and socio-political responsibilities? In this article, I suggest that observations of strategic essentialism can help us unmask the power dynamics that shape the rules of public discussion in a society. Taking the example of romantic portrayals of Bedouins as indigenous farmers, I use this image as a springboard in my writing to consider why this essentialization holds rhetorical power in Israel. What does it say about the society within which these environmental justice campaigns take place? Through this analysis, I attempt to de-naturalize dominant discourses of Bedouins (and Jews) and the social inequalities these discourses perpetuate.
Book Reviews by Emily McKee
Environment and Society, 2017
In focusing on low-income and minority urban farmers and social justice activists, Beyond the Kal... more In focusing on low-income and minority urban farmers and social justice activists, Beyond the Kale usefully articulates the blind spots and injustices of popular images of urban agriculture as rooftop gardeners raising specialty crops and middle-class young people “homesteading” in urban cores. The book misses opportunities to more clearly connect forces of structural discrimination to particular urban agriculture initiatives or elucidate the impacts these groups are currently having. However, its many discussions of innovative social justice work and activists’ intellectual contributions make this worthwhile for readers in college classrooms, urban planning task forces, and activists’ strategy meetings, alike.
McKee, Emily. “Review of Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City. Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen. 2016.” Environment and Society 8, no. 1 (2017): 220–22.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2008
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2005
Other Writing by Emily McKee
Jadaliyya, 2024
Blog post by Emily McKee and Alaa A M
On January 9, 2018, the Small Farm Futures workshop took place on the campus of Northern Illinois... more On January 9, 2018, the Small Farm Futures workshop took place on the campus of Northern Illinois University. The goals were two-fold. First, I aimed to share the findings of my research thus far on the opportunities and obstacles facing diversified and sustainable farming in northern Illinois in a way that promoted further dialogue about these findings. This led to the second goal, to engage in participatory research design with diversified farmers and others invested in creating prosperous local food systems in Illinois.
This workshop was a strategic effort to bring the voices of small-scale food producers more directly into the design of agriculture research. The heart of the workshop centered on this question: How can further applied social science research address the farming challenges that small-scale producers see as being highest priority?
The workshop took inspiration from a January 2016 gathering of farmers and local food advocates at Starved Rock State Park, hosted by the Angelic Organics Learning Center. At that summit, participants identified key shared challenges for direct market farms and began discussing solutions. The workshop at NIU drew on this past work and moved towards a targeted goal: to cooperatively develop a prioritized list of specific research questions for which qualitative and mixed methods are well suited.
This report includes the information presented and discussions held at the workshop, and it highlights the priority challenges and potential research directions identified by participants. Participants have agreed to share their contact information, and I encourage any readers who are interested in collaborating on research—whether as fellow academics, food producers, or other participants in local food systems—to contact me.
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Books by Emily McKee
Dwelling in Conflict offers the first study of land conflict and environment based on extensive fieldwork within both Arab and Jewish settings. It explores planned towns for Jews and for Bedouin Arabs, unrecognized villages, and single-family farmsteads, as well as Knesset hearings, media coverage, and activist projects. Emily McKee sensitively portrays the impact that dividing lines—both physical and social—have on residents. She investigates the political charge of people's everyday interactions with their environments and the ways in which basic understandings of people and "their" landscapes drive political developments. While recognizing deep divisions, McKee also takes seriously the social projects that residents engage in to soften and challenge socio-environmental boundaries. Ultimately, Dwelling in Conflict highlights opportunities for boundary crossings, revealing both contemporary segregation and the possible mutability of these dividing lines in the future.
Journal Articles and Chapters by Emily McKee
McKee, Emily. 2021. “Where Do ‘Localphiles’ Shop?: A Mixed-Methods Case Study of Food-Buying Habits.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 10 (2): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2021.102.023.
As activists frame campaigns, their region’s broader cultural and political context intercedes. In Israel and Palestine attempts to work across national lines and undertake activism that links ecological, economic, and social issues have long been stymied. This article examines how the fraught historical and contemporary relationships of Israelis and Palestinians with land bestow both flexibility and limitations on their framing of campaigns. In particular, it ethnographically analyzes the framing of two projects—the building of an “eco-mosque” and a Jordan River restoration effort—to examine how activists grapple with frame flexibility and its limits. It finds that an Israeli tendency to deterritorialize environmental issues and curb environmental campaigns that are “too political” conflicts with Palestinian criticism of apolitical frames because they euphemize violence and domination. These cases demonstrate how local connotations can make or break environmental campaigns. The eco-adage, “Think global, act local” is not enough. One must think local, too.
In contexts of land conflict and deep social divisions, evaluations of dirty and disordered landscapes carry social and political weight. This article employs a “political dwelling” perspective in southern Israel to examine how links between Bedouin character, litter and disorder, and lawlessness have become widespread, even naturalized, among many government officials and Jewish residents and even some Bedouin Arab residents. Contemporary trash talk draws on, but simultaneously masks, a history of state-building projects that employed Orientalist evaluations of order and disorder and segregationist approaches to development. While this masking of social construction is a property of all symbolically powerful social distinctions, I argue that the distinctions undergirding trash talk are especially accessible for normalization because of the language of nature within which they are expressed—natural landscapes, ethnic groups, and human nature. As a result, trash talk naturalizes links between dirty places, disorderly people, and the need to remove (or reform) them. This trash talk has profound emotional and material consequences for Bedouin residents of Israel because the discourse makes it easier for many within mainstream Israeli society to treat Bedouin Arabs themselves as matter out of place and to justify various acts of social control.
Book Reviews by Emily McKee
McKee, Emily. “Review of Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City. Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen. 2016.” Environment and Society 8, no. 1 (2017): 220–22.
Other Writing by Emily McKee
This workshop was a strategic effort to bring the voices of small-scale food producers more directly into the design of agriculture research. The heart of the workshop centered on this question: How can further applied social science research address the farming challenges that small-scale producers see as being highest priority?
The workshop took inspiration from a January 2016 gathering of farmers and local food advocates at Starved Rock State Park, hosted by the Angelic Organics Learning Center. At that summit, participants identified key shared challenges for direct market farms and began discussing solutions. The workshop at NIU drew on this past work and moved towards a targeted goal: to cooperatively develop a prioritized list of specific research questions for which qualitative and mixed methods are well suited.
This report includes the information presented and discussions held at the workshop, and it highlights the priority challenges and potential research directions identified by participants. Participants have agreed to share their contact information, and I encourage any readers who are interested in collaborating on research—whether as fellow academics, food producers, or other participants in local food systems—to contact me.
Dwelling in Conflict offers the first study of land conflict and environment based on extensive fieldwork within both Arab and Jewish settings. It explores planned towns for Jews and for Bedouin Arabs, unrecognized villages, and single-family farmsteads, as well as Knesset hearings, media coverage, and activist projects. Emily McKee sensitively portrays the impact that dividing lines—both physical and social—have on residents. She investigates the political charge of people's everyday interactions with their environments and the ways in which basic understandings of people and "their" landscapes drive political developments. While recognizing deep divisions, McKee also takes seriously the social projects that residents engage in to soften and challenge socio-environmental boundaries. Ultimately, Dwelling in Conflict highlights opportunities for boundary crossings, revealing both contemporary segregation and the possible mutability of these dividing lines in the future.
McKee, Emily. 2021. “Where Do ‘Localphiles’ Shop?: A Mixed-Methods Case Study of Food-Buying Habits.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 10 (2): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2021.102.023.
As activists frame campaigns, their region’s broader cultural and political context intercedes. In Israel and Palestine attempts to work across national lines and undertake activism that links ecological, economic, and social issues have long been stymied. This article examines how the fraught historical and contemporary relationships of Israelis and Palestinians with land bestow both flexibility and limitations on their framing of campaigns. In particular, it ethnographically analyzes the framing of two projects—the building of an “eco-mosque” and a Jordan River restoration effort—to examine how activists grapple with frame flexibility and its limits. It finds that an Israeli tendency to deterritorialize environmental issues and curb environmental campaigns that are “too political” conflicts with Palestinian criticism of apolitical frames because they euphemize violence and domination. These cases demonstrate how local connotations can make or break environmental campaigns. The eco-adage, “Think global, act local” is not enough. One must think local, too.
In contexts of land conflict and deep social divisions, evaluations of dirty and disordered landscapes carry social and political weight. This article employs a “political dwelling” perspective in southern Israel to examine how links between Bedouin character, litter and disorder, and lawlessness have become widespread, even naturalized, among many government officials and Jewish residents and even some Bedouin Arab residents. Contemporary trash talk draws on, but simultaneously masks, a history of state-building projects that employed Orientalist evaluations of order and disorder and segregationist approaches to development. While this masking of social construction is a property of all symbolically powerful social distinctions, I argue that the distinctions undergirding trash talk are especially accessible for normalization because of the language of nature within which they are expressed—natural landscapes, ethnic groups, and human nature. As a result, trash talk naturalizes links between dirty places, disorderly people, and the need to remove (or reform) them. This trash talk has profound emotional and material consequences for Bedouin residents of Israel because the discourse makes it easier for many within mainstream Israeli society to treat Bedouin Arabs themselves as matter out of place and to justify various acts of social control.
McKee, Emily. “Review of Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City. Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen. 2016.” Environment and Society 8, no. 1 (2017): 220–22.
This workshop was a strategic effort to bring the voices of small-scale food producers more directly into the design of agriculture research. The heart of the workshop centered on this question: How can further applied social science research address the farming challenges that small-scale producers see as being highest priority?
The workshop took inspiration from a January 2016 gathering of farmers and local food advocates at Starved Rock State Park, hosted by the Angelic Organics Learning Center. At that summit, participants identified key shared challenges for direct market farms and began discussing solutions. The workshop at NIU drew on this past work and moved towards a targeted goal: to cooperatively develop a prioritized list of specific research questions for which qualitative and mixed methods are well suited.
This report includes the information presented and discussions held at the workshop, and it highlights the priority challenges and potential research directions identified by participants. Participants have agreed to share their contact information, and I encourage any readers who are interested in collaborating on research—whether as fellow academics, food producers, or other participants in local food systems—to contact me.
Sustainability has become a popular term around the world, typically centered on environmental sustain- ability, with social sustainability treated separately. Yet, as with other popular terms, sustainability is acquiring additional connotations. Creative campaigns like those I witnessed in the Negev contribute to this widening semantic domain and demonstrate its importance....