Nejm Benessaiah
Nejm Benessaiah is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Georgetown.
Nejm Benessaiah is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Georgetown. As an anthropologist of technology and the environment, his research interests include climate change, water and data infrastructures, environmental justice, social movements, oases, the Sahara, Algeria, and the Middle East and North Africa. He is currently investigating the potential for upscaling ways to commonly govern important goods for humankind, such as water, the atmosphere, art, and digital knowledge. His most recent work investigates the role of voluntary associations in contemporary water management in North Africa, conceptualizing them as “micro-movements” in order to contrast how they may be key to managing (new) change, as opposed to customary governance regimes which are configured to maintain the status quo. He has published in Ethnobiology Letters and Quaternary International, and has book chapters in Law and Property in Algeria: Anthropological Perspectives, and African Anthropologies in the Post-colony (HSRC Press). He has also written for Truthout and the Daily Maverick.