Overview
Jake Silver in a Post-Doctoral Associate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell. Trained as an anthropologist, his research explores how scientific, geophysical, and colonial transformations stubbornly thread through one another, especially as they reshape everyday concerns, safety, and horizons for Palestinians living in the West Bank. His in-process book manuscript, The Sky, Upended, centers astronomy, outer space, and the sky as critical sites to explore the changing dimensions of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. On the one hand, this dimension is atmospheric and vertical, as Palestinian astronomers encounter Israeli surveillance and artillery technologies that are creeping further and further into outer space and reconfiguring settler colonial infrastructures, both perceptible and imperceptible to the naked eye. On the other, this dimension is socioeconomic, as the foundation of novel scientific and astronomical networks in the West Bank have given way to new civic and professional possibilities in a region so often characterized solely by loss and stagnation, especially over the past two years. His work relies heavily on methods that combine ethnography and STS, disentangling how facts about the known and environmental world (say, the sky) are heavily inflected by colonial imbalances, political scripts, and militarism. These methods also inform two new related research projects: Science for Whom? and Gaza Unearthed.
Before joining Cornell, Jake was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University. He completed in Ph.D. (2022) in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, where he also received Certificates in Middle East Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. All this began with a B.A. at Reed College (2012), where he first studied anthropology, Palestine studies, and queer theory.
Research Focus
- Political anthropology
- Science and (settler) colonialism
- The environmental humanities
- Cultures of astronomy and astrophysics
- Imaginations of the sky and outer space
- The question of Palestine
Publications
"Tear Gas in Orbit: On the Olfactory and the Extraplanetary in Palestine." American Ethnologist 50, no 1: 129–40, 2023.
"Science’s Stories and Other Possible Grammars." Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 8, no. 2: 1–13, 2022.
"Familiar Pixels: Imag(in)ing the Dead and the Political in Israel/Palestine." American Anthropologist 123, no. 1: 120–36, 2021.
"Cruising the Jerusalem Light Rail." differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 31, no. 2: 115–51, 2020.
"Review of Queer Beirut by Sofian Merabet." Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 14, no. 2: 224–26, 2018.