Cynthia Kreichati

Cynthia Kreichati is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University (supervisor Diana Allan); She holds a FRQSC doctoral scholarship. Trained as a pharmacist in Lebanon, Cynthia also holds a Masters in Sociology from the American University in Beirut and has worked in various health related fields. Prior to starting her PhD, Cynthia was an advisor for Médecins Sans Frontières in Lebanon. Her work currently explores the relationships between politics, archives and the environment. She is now completing her doctoral dissertation project, an ethnography of the Litani river – Lebanon’s most important water resource – and its people. She is a member of the McGill Refugee Research Group, and an editorial board member of Bidayat (Beginnings), an Arabic language quarterly published from Beirut.

contact: cyntia.kraichati@mail.mcgill.ca

Projects

Watershed Lives: An Ethnography of River Infrastructure and Ruination in Lebanon

(Doctoral Dissertation, ongoing) explores the multi-scalar relationships that make up the Litani river watershed where the Lebanese state had failed to successfully implement the Litani Hydropower and Irrigation Project. Initially conceived as the country’s first and most important investment in technological modernity, the Litani Project has now become a synecdoche of state failure. Combining ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this dissertation explores how infrastructural projects, once conceptualized as central to modern state formation, have become implicated in their undoing. In probing the political economy of infrastructures and the sociocultural and ecological practices they prompt in everyday life in Lebanon, this research seeks to contribute to the reconceptualization of politics under late capitalist ruination. Her research is supported by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec and in 2022 she was visiting doctoral fellow at the Orient-Institut Beirut, part of the Max Weber Foundation.

The Nakba Archive (Research Collaborator; Principal Investigator: Professor Diana Allan; ongoing) is a grassroots oral history initiative founded in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon and that has recorded over 500 audiovisual testimonies with first generation refugees about the events of the 1948 expulsion and histories of exile in Lebanon. Cynthia’s work centers specifically around two pilot projects for the Nakba Archive: developing digital tools and educational material for different publics; and co-leading a participatory research which documents histories of Palestinian relocation within Lebanon. This project is supported by the Local Engagement Refugee Research Network (LERRN) at Carleton University.

Knowledge and the Trash: Predominance of the “Expert Model” during the 2015 Beirut Protests (MA Thesis, American University of Beirut, completed January 2017) investigated the roles of waste management experts and environmental activists during a short-lived, yet significant, Lebanese anti-government uprising. Using participant observation and interviews, this study underscores how professionalized activists engaged in a wide-array of practices concerning specialized knowledge production, brokering and mobilization. It also argues that these techno-political discourses, which have created exclusive networks of authority and expertise, were sharply dissonant with the protests’ wider expressions of sociopolitical discontent.

Arab Social Science Monitor project (Research Consultant with the Beirut-based Arab Council for the Social Sciences; Apr 2019 – Jul 2019) investigated the infrastructures of social science knowledge production, dissemination and translation with an emphasis on research centers and social scientific professional associations based in the Middle East.

Publications

Kreichati, Cynthia. “The Politics of Listening” in Diana Allan (Ed.) Voices from the Nakba Archive: Fragments from the Palestinian Expulsion, (London: Pluto Press, 2021).

Kreichati, Cynthia. “The Nakba Archive and The Politics of Listening” in Diana Allan (Ed.) Voices from the Nakba Archive: Fragments from the Palestinian Expulsion, (forthcoming, London: Pluto Press, anticipated publication date April 2021).

Activity

“The Gift of Electricity”. Guest Lecture with the Anthropological Society in Lebanon, Mansion Blatt, Beirut. September 2022.

 “Out of Frame” (organizer, September 2018 – December 2019) is a Montreal-based reading group that seeks to situate Arab modernist thought in relation to contemporary debates that order knowledge between canonical center and peripheries. More specifically, the reading group explores relationships between fieldwork and theory and investigates the processes and meanings associated with the decolonization of a western canon.

Bidayat Magazine (editorial board member) is an Arabic language quarterly published from Beirut. Notable activities with Bidayat include “On independent publishing in the Arab World” a talk given at the Beirut Art Center in August 2019, and the editing of a special issue, a joint Bidayat-Glanta magazine launched at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and at the Gothenburg Literature House in Gothenburg in November 2017.