Joanne Nucho

I am an anthropologist and filmmaker who specializes in the politics of the built environment and infrastructure, nonfiction and experimental film and video as well as visual ethnography.

My first book, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services and Power (Princeton University Press, 2016), is about how fragmented infrastructures in Lebanon — things like private electricity generator subscription systems and social welfare managed by religious-affiliated institutions— help to produce and recalibrate notions of sectarian belonging and exclusion. I have also written about how contestations over infrastructure like sanitation as well as formal and informal channels of social service provision can provide resources for emergent forms of political organizing and urban citizenship.

I am also a co-editor of Thinking Infrastructures (Emerald Press 2019), an interdisciplinary volume that explores research on informational infrastructures to show how thinking, thought, and cognition as in ideas/rationalities and the practice/activity of thinking are inseparable from infrastructures.

I am currently writing a book on energy transition in California, and in particular what I call “post-grid imaginaries,” and the emergence of home backup battery systems and microgrids in the context of the transition to renewable energy in California. I have published essays on energy decentralization in California and continue to write about the emergence of decentralized solar energy to address electricity fragmentation in Lebanon.

My films have screened in various contexts including the London International Documentary Film Festival in 2008, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 2017. In 2016, I completed a feature length experimental documentary, The Narrow Streets of Bourj Hammoud, about the experiences of residents of Bourj Hammoud, a suburb of Beirut, Lebanon. An associated website, Mapping Bourj Hammoud, features the drawings made by a number of collaborators and participants throughout the production of the film. 

I am a co-editor of the journal Cultural Anthropology. I am also a co-section editor (politics) at Public Books, where I commission essays on a number of topics, including this 2021 series on the anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles and how it continues to shape the world.