When Wounds Travel: Ecologies of War and Healthcare East of the Mediterranean

A presentation by Omar Dewachi, associate professor of medical anthropology and global health at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. His work examines the social, medical, and environmental fallouts of decades of war and violence in Iraq and the broader Middle East. Before he joined Rutgers in 2018, Dewachi cofounded the Conflict Medicine Program at the American University of Beirut, where he taught social medicine and global health.

Trained in medicine and anthropology, Dewachi works at the intersections of global health, history of medicine, and political anthropology. In this lecture, he will conduct a critical historical and ethnographic exploration of the biopolitical unravelings following the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and its reverberations across the region, focusing on the individual, collective, and institutional struggles to cope with, and care for, war-related afflictions.