Ourabah, Massilia | France

Massilia Ourabah is a postdoctoral researcher at Gent University (Belgium). She obtained her MSc in Social Sciences at the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) and has completed her PhD at the Department of Sociology, UGent. She is a former fellow of the “Technology, the Environment, and the Future of Europe” programme at the Remarque Institute, NYU (New York). Her work is at the crossroads of Feminist STS and environmentalism.
 

Project at IAS-STS: Seasoning: Tasting climate change through the diasporic circulation of olive oil
This projects probes the experiential reality of climate change. It does so not by focusing on its most vivid occurrences – such as floods or megafires – but on the banality of its daily materiality. Through ethnographic research, this project follows the track of olive oil circulated by the Algerian diaspora in France. The production of Algerian olive oil, a good ancestrally produced and traditionally imported though informal and kin-based diasporic commodity circuits, is being affected by global warming which decreases volumes, renders it vulnerable to marketisation, and alters its taste. Pursuing feminist STS efforts to decentre techno-scientific approaches to environmental knowledge production, this project seeks to understand climate change not as a supra-historical phenomenon managed through technoscience, but as an embodied one, intertwined in historical legacies crafted mundanely. It interrogates how climate change affects not only the sustainability of food systems, but also the sustenance of histories. In other words, it examines climate change not only as a phenomenon that shapes how futures are being made, but also how pasts are being made.
 

Selected Publications

Ourabah, M. (2025). Non-logocentric participation in Eco-Reproductive Labour: Labours of life on unstable ground. Sociological Research Online.

Ourabah, M. (2020). The Social Life of a ‘Herstory’ Textbook. Bridging Institutionalism and Actor-Network Theory. Palgrave Macmillan: London.