Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

Anthropologist and Film-Maker

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an anthropologist and film-maker with extensive fieldwork experience in Israel/Palestine and in Greece. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford, 2019), has won five major book awards, and examines waste management in the absence of a state. She has also published on the relationship between waste and environmental impact assessments, electricity services, climate change adaptation, humanitarian aid, and the idea of heritage in the West Bank, as well as on the impacts of short-term rentals on local and displaced communities in the West Bank and Athens, Greece. Her second book, which explores the impacts of Airbnb on property ownership in Athens, is under contract with Duke University Press. She is beginning fieldwork on a next project on the rise of "demand avoidance" as diagnosis and lived experience for autistic people. Her work has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Foundation, and the Wenner Gren Foundation. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University and an Msc. in Forced Migration from the University of Oxford. She serves on the editorial teams of Cultural Anthropology and Critical AI. More on her scholarship and film-making can be found here: https://sophiastamatopoulourobbins.com/. 

Areas of Interest: Israel/Palestine, Greece, ecologies of war, infrastructure, property ownership, disability, neurodivergence, health