Kali Rubaii

Kali Rubaii earned her PhD in Anthropology from University of California, Santa Cruz and her BA in International Relations from University of California, Davis.

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Specialization: displacement, ecologies of war, spatial politics, forensic ethnography, health justice, Middle East.

Kali Rubaii is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University, interested in sharpening resistance strategies that target the vulnerable nexus between coercive power and the physical world.

Her research explores the environmental impacts of less-than-lethal militarism, and how military projects (re)arrange political ecologies in the name of “letting live.” Her book project, Counter-resurgency, examines how farmers in Anbar, Iraq struggle to survive and recover from transnational counterinsurgency projects.

She is currently conducting fieldwork for two ethnographic projects: Taking toxicity as an analytic for material politics, she is working with a team of doctors, epidemiologists, and environmental activists to document the links between the epidemic of birth defects in Fallujah and military environmental damage. She is also researching the corporate-military enterprise of concrete production in post-invasion Iraq and how it enforces global regimes of class and citizenship.