Education:
2002-2003: Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Geography, Dartmouth College
2003: Ph.D., Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University
- Alatout, S. Forthcoming. Water imaginaries and the construction of the political geography of the Jordan River: the Johnston Mission, 1953-1956. In K. Davis and Edmund Burke III (eds.), Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East: History, Policy, Power & Practice. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.
- Harris, L. and S. Alatout. 2010. Negotiating Hydro-Scales, Forging States: Comparison of the Upper Tigris-Euphrates and Jordan River Basins. Political Geography.
- Alatout, S. and Chelsea Schelly. Forthcoming 2010. Rural Electrification as a ‘bioterritorial’ Technology: Redefining space, citizenship, and power during the New Deal. Radical History Review 107.
- Alatout, S. 2009. The Israeli Separation Wall and Technologies of Government: the Double Construction of Geographies of Peace and Conflict, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99 (5): 956-968.
- Alatout, S. 2009. Bringing abundance back into environmental politics: Constructing a Zionist Network of Abundance, Immigration, and Colonization, 1918-1948. Social Studies of Science 39 (3): 363-394.
- Alatout, S. 2008. ‘States’ of Scarcity: Water, Space, and Identity Politics in Israel, 1948-1959. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26 (6): 959-982.
- Alatout, S. 2008. Locating the fragments of the state and their limits: water policymaking in Israel during the 1950s. Journal of Israel Studies Forum 23 (summer): 40-65.
- Alatout, S. 2007. State-ing natural resources through law: the codification and articulation of water scarcity and citizenship in Israel. Arab World Geographers 10, 1: 16-37.
- Alatout, S. 2007. From abundance to scarcity (1936-1959): a ‘fluid’ history of Jewish subjectivity in historic Palestine and Israel. In Mark LeVine and Sandy Sufian (eds.), Reapproaching the border: new perspectives on the study of Palestine/Israel. New York: Rowan Publishers.
- Alatout, S. 2006. Towards a bio-territorial conception of power: territory, population, and environmental narratives in Palestine and Israel. Political Geography 25, 6: 601-621.
- Alatout, S. 2005. Narratives of Power: Territory, Population, and Environmental Politics in Palestine and Israel. In Stuart Schoenfeld (ed.), Environmental Narratives in Israel and Palestine. Toronto: Center for Security Studies, the University of Toronto.
- Alatout, S. 2000. Water Balances in Palestine, Regional Cooperation, and the Politics of Numbers. In David Brooks and Ozay Mehmet (eds.), Water Balances in the Eastern Mediterranean. Ottawa, Canada: IDRC Books.
Conceptual:
Science and technology studies (sociology and politics of science and technology)
Social theories of power and government
Biopolitics, Foucault
Social theories of territory with a focus on borders
Political and cultural geography
Borders: This research is meant to be a book-length project on the history of the concept of borders in modernity, late modernity, colonial and postcolonial times. At least initially, the empirical focus of the project will be on a comparative study of environmental issues at the borders in the US/Mexico and Palestine/Israel.
Towards a bio-territorial framework of power and government: This theoretical intervention critically engages the writings of Michel Foucault (benefiting from his contributions in biopolitics and relations of power in late modernity) and conventional state theory.
Environmental security/insecurity: In this project I critically engage the notion of national- and human-security, problematize their basic assumptions, and critically investigate the moves in recent decades to understand the environment from within different security narratives.
History of rivers as borders: There is ample evidence, maybe somewhat suggestive, that rivers were enrolled in nation and/or state building projects and used as markers of borders in recent history (last two centuries). This project aims to understand this transformation and its link to the colonial encounter.
Undergraduate:
Water Policy in International Contexts
International Development, Environment, and Sustainability
Graduate Seminars:
Social theories of Power
Social theories of border
Local and Regional Approaches to Sustainability and Vulnerability
Affiliations:
- Department of Community and Environmental Sociology
- Graduate Program of Sociology
- Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies
- Department of Geography
- Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies
- Center for Culture, History, and Environment
- Certificate on the Humans and the Global Environment
- Water Resources Program
- Middle East Studies Program
- Development Studies Program
- Agroecology Program
- Sustainability and the Global Environment
- Center for World Affairs and Global Economy
- Global Studies
- Global Legal Studies Initiative