John Warner

Topics of Interest:
Political and Economic Anthropology, Urban Anthropology, Political Economy, Critical Geography, Middle East Studies, Environmental Studies, Political Ecology, Political Theory

Countries/Regions of Interest:
Yemen, Oman, Arabian Peninsula, Horn of Africa

List of Publications

“The Art of Resistance: Labor, Debt, and G.U.L.F.’s Guggenheim Campaign,” Jadaliyya (16 May 2014), with Nate Christensen.

“Aesthetic Explorations of the Mundane,” Jadaliyya (7 November 2013).

Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula. Washington, DC: Tadween Publishing, July 2013, with Rosie Bsheer.

“Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula,” Jadaliyya (22 April 2013), with Rosie Bsheer.

“Questioning Sectarianism in Bahrain and Beyond,” Jadaliyya (17 April 2013).

“Greening Displacement,” Anthropology Now Vol. 2, No. 2 (2010).

“Pious and Profitable,” Anthropology Now, Vol. 1, No. 3 (2009).

“Waging Tourism,” Anthropology Now, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2009).

John Warner is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His first dissertation research project focused on public service infrastructures, illicit economic networks, and natural resource usage in urban Yemen. His work interrogates the processes by which water in Yemen, and in the Middle East more broadly, becomes commoditized, and challenges analyses of resource scarcity that adopt exclusively environmental/demographic frameworks. This research asks questions of the changing nature of state regulatory institutions and trade agreements under late capitalism, the deepening reliance on primary commodities in the economy, and the shifting obligations of public welfare and basic goods – all of which shape the social, political, and commercial landscape in which natural resources become exploited as economic objects. He is currently in the process of developing a second dissertation research project, centered in Salalah, Oman, that seeks to examine the emergent forms of citizenship and state that post-oil projects of economic development produce.

John has taught anthropology and Middle East studies at several different institutions – including Queensborough Community College, Hunter College, and New York University – since 2007. He is currently a co-editor of Jadaliyya’s Arabian Peninsula page and formerly a co-editor of the Findings section of the scholarly journal Anthropology Now. He has worked as an assistant director and field producer for Quilting Point Productions on the production of two documentary film series that critically examined the discourse on the War on Terror.