My first book, Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine: How Occupied Landscapes Shape Scientific Knowledge has just been published by the MIT Press. The MIT page has a summary and quotes from Laleh Khalili and Stefan Helmreich, two people whose work I really admire.
The book is available online via independent bookstores in the Netherlands and the US, and it’s also on all of the larger sites, like Amazon, which has a Kindle version. I’m very grateful to my family, advisors, colleagues, and everyone at MIT who made it possible.
It’s an academic book that makes the theoretical argument that geographic and political landscapes (where we are) influence knowledge (what we know). Those landscapes don’t simply exist independently of humans, however. Instead they are shaped and worked over through social and political processes, like efforts to establish and enforce political borders or the boundaries of land ownership. So I argue that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank has shaped the landscape, and through that the content of maps and geographic knowledge, in very specific ways that I explore in the book.
This book grew out of my dissertation at Maastricht University. Of course like any project, there wasn’t room for a good part of the fieldwork and research in the final manuscript. So if you’re interested in the book and related issues, then keep watching this blog. My current work explores things like how society and space are shaped by economic systems, like global capitalism and logistical chains, and socio-technical ones like data and internet infrastructure.
Jess Bier 