Marianna B. Reis

Biography

Marianna B. Reis is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Greater Nazareth Area and Wadi Ara, her doctoral project investigates how residents of Palestinian towns and cities within northern Israel and Palestinian planning justice advocates maneuver through, experience, make demands for, and push up against urban infrastructural development and planning during a time of unprecedented investment by the State of Israel in the material, economic, and social conditions of its Palestinian localities. In particular, she is interested in how discourses around connectivity and mobility reveal an unstable and ambivalent relationship between the desire for and the consequences of infrastructural upgrade, and what this reveals about the materialities of citizenship under settler colonialism. Similarly, her project is concerned with how planning advocacy strategies are caught between, and at times take for granted, neoliberal discourses of technical planning expertise, liberal democratic discourses of citizen participation, and discourses of resistance that highlight the limitations of formal and informal participation in urban development. Marianna is the recipient of the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (2018), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship (2018-2020), among other distinguished awards.