Join us on Friday, May 22nd at noon PT for our next Scholar Series webinar with Brahim El Guabli, author of Desert Imaginations: A History of Saharanism and Its Radical Consequences.

Deserts occupy a third of the Earth's area. They are very ubiquitous landscapes and ecologies, but they are also understood as being remote, dead, and empty. Most important, these assumptions about desert spaces have a history that scholarship has not conceptualized in terms that would make it discrete. Using the notion of "Saharanism," Brahim will chart the history of ideas that has allowed different entities to do what has been done in and to deserts for a very long time.

Brahim's scholarship provides a window through which to see the siting of U.S. nuclear weapons activities anew. Features of "Saharanism" show up in many of the locations chosen in the U.S. for nuclear weapons activities (mining, weapons production, testing), such as the shrub steppe ecosystem of the Hanford site, which was viewed by many as an isolated wasteland.

Funded in part by a Public Participation Grant from the Washington State Department of Ecology.