This event brings together scholars working on Lebanon across affect theory and critical political economy to make sense of the current moment. The event thinks through material infrastructures of survival not only as responses to the present crisis, but also as forces that shape Lebanon’s future.

Yara Damaj is a political theorist who is broadly interested in the psychic and affective nodes of structural collapse. Her dissertation examines what she calls dispossession by nostalgia in Lebanon. She will be graduating from Penn with a PhD in Political Science in May 2026.

Jowel Choufani is an anthropologist whose work examines state abandonment and community-based solidarity infrastructures in Lebanon, and the moral and political economies that shape them. She will be graduating with a PhD in Anthropology from the George Washington University in May 2026.