The Parts Per Million Project
Dr. Rubaii leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers concerned about multi-generational and reproductive health effects of environmental exposures to the war industry and military supply chains, including US military burn pits, mineral mines, and cement factories. Related scholarship: “Bone uranium and lead in bone concentrations in adults from Fallujah, Iraq,” in Environmental Pollution; “Deferral and dispersal: The military violence of post-war clean-up” in Human Organization; “Birth Defects and the Toxic Legacy of War in Iraq,” Middle East Report.
Displacement and Affect
Dr. Rubaii’s research on war transhumance —how internally displaced farmers travel to and from their land during episodes of military violence— depicts Anbari farmers who outlast conditions of military violence to repair their land, plants, and waterways. Based on long-term fieldwork between 2014 and 2023, this project identifies how the US invasion transformed Iraq’s environment and how people resist alienation from their land. Related scholarship: “This is why we protect the rivers, This is how we protect the rivers.” Critical Times; “Tripartheid: How Sectarianism Became Internal to Being in Anbar, Iraq,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review; “Note the Ghosts: Among the More-than-Living in Iraq,” War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments.
Cement, Concrete, and Carcerality
Dr. Rubaii’s research on the cement and concrete industry in Iraq examines how militarism hides itself in construction, producing lasting conditions of coercion in the name of post-war recovery. Exploring sites of cement mining, concrete production, batching plants, concrete “graveyards,” and walled checkpoints, Dr. Rubaii investigates the militarized logics that propel the industry, as well as the impact of the industry on local ecologies. Related scholarship: The Social Properties of Concrete; “‘Concrete Soldiers’: T-walls and Coercive Landscaping in Iraq,” International Journal of Middle East Studies; Cement and displacement: material life in the wake of extractive war, American Ethnologist.
