Keynote Speech

"Palestine Teaches: Why History Matters" by Dr Rana Barakat

For the past nineteen months, genocidal violence has marked the everyday. Unbearable in its escalation across the geographies of Palestine, this violence is not new. We have a name for the inception of settler colonialism’s fragmentation: Nakba. We have a name for this century of violence working to destroy Palestinian peoplehood: ongoing Nakba. In the face of an escalating Nakba, in an age of catastrophe, our histories, like our bodies, and our lands are in fragments. We have a name for this fragmentation: shatat. In the Nakba War, between the winter months of 1947, throughout the following year of 1948 and into the spring and summer of 1949, Zionist militias displaced three-quarters of the Palestinian people from their homeland. This was the initial making of shatat, the displacement, dispersion, destruction of a people that remains ongoing. The attempt to eliminate Palestinian life in Gaza is its culmination, or at least one of them.

The ongoing Nakba demands and makes demands of the historical. Epistemic erasure has rendered history a necessary means to document and resist the ongoing Nakba. The imperative of writing history has borne rich methodological contributions from the permission to narrate, to storytelling as navigating catastrophe, to memories of forgetfulness. These methodological interventions, like Palestine itself, are today under duress.

Palestine is not an exception. Today catastrophe is global. In 2025, Palestine is where the world is imploding through extraordinary explosions. The unbearable accumulation of horror requires documentation of death and destruction, of relentless war from the shores of the sea to the mountains that frame the river, and far beyond. Palestine is world making. As Palestinians are being brutally targeted from the air, sea and land, as infrastructures of life and living are destroyed, we struggle to count, the injured, the arrested and the dead — we struggle to claim life.

Palestine is today, the place of old worlds dying and new ones being born. We have names that respond to catastrophe and fragmentation, methods to gather the past and the present towards the future. Shatat is not simply exile or diaspora, it is a fragmentation that demands new ways a unification. We have a name, and a practice for that remedy: lam shaml. It means to be under collective care, to be covered, to be nurtured, to be gathered and to gather. Writing history in the present moves from and through shatat to this condition of nurture, care, and unity. It is a return of sorts in the conceptual horizon of ongoing return. For the Palestinians of the past and the present, under the constant reality of catastrophe and fragmentation, have honed practices of gathering and returning to land, to people, and to one another.

Dr Rana Barakat

Rana Barakat is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Director of the Birzeit University Museum. Her research interests include the history and historiography of colonialism, nationalism, and cultures of resistance. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Chicago and has since published in several venues including the Journal of Palestine Studies, Jerusalem Quarterly, Settler Colonial Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. She has a forthcoming book with UNC Press titled: "Ongoing Return: Mapping Memory and Storytelling in Palestine," which advances an Indigenous understanding of time, space, and memory in Palestine by focusing on the details of the people and place of Lifta village over time. And her second book, in-progress, "The Buraq Revolt: Constructing a History of Resistance in Palestine," argues that the 1929 revolt was the first sign in the Mandate period of sustained mass resistance to the settler-colonial project, including direct and rhetorical actions against both political Zionism and British imperialism, planting seeds of mass political mobilization.

Conference Plenary

"Ruins and Rebuilding: Academic and Activist Solidarities Across Borders"

Dr Hashem Abushama

Dr Hashem Abushama is an Associate Professor in Human Geography at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. He holds a DPhil in Human Geography and an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Peace and Global Studies from Earlham College in the United States. He is also a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin as well as a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies. He writes on dispossession, arts, urbanization, the archives, and postcolonial Marxism.

Dr Muna Dajani

Dr. Muna Dajani is an action researcher with a background in critical political ecology. Her work aims to understand environmental and water governance through decolonial and critical lenses. She holds a PhD from the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics (LSE). Her doctoral research focused on examining community struggles for rights to water and land resources in settler colonial contexts in Palestine and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, with special attention to how farming practices acquire political subjectivity. Dajani is currently a Fellow in Environment at the Geography and Environment Department at LSE.

Dr Jasmine K. Gani

Dr Jasmine K. Gani is Assistant Professor of International Relations Theory at the London School of Economics and Politics Science. She writes and teaches on (anti)colonialism, knowledge production, theory and history of International Relations, and the Middle East. Her work on the Middle East focuses particularly on Israel-Palestine, Syria, Egypt, the role of western powers, ideologies and social movements, and anti-colonial solidarities. Her research has been published in International Studies Quarterly, Security Dialogue, International Affairs, Postcolonial Studies, and Millennium, among others; and she has authored and co-edited books on anti-colonialism, the politics of the Middle East, and the Syrian conflict. Prior to joining the LSE in September 2024, she was a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of St Andrews, where she was co-Director of the Centre for Syrian Studies. She was previously an Editor of the journal Millennium, and currently sits on the editorial board of International Affairs.

Dr Gholam Khiabany

Gholam Khiabany is a Reader in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research interests centre on the media and social change and the relationship between communication and democracy with particular reference to the Middle East. His publications include Iranian Media: The Paradox of Modernity; Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran (with Annabelle Sreberny); and The Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East (co-edited with Tourya Guaaybess, Joe Khalil and Bilge Yesil)). Gholam is a member of council of management of the Institute of Race Relations and editorial board of Race & Class.

Dr Aya Nassar

Aya Nassar is an Assistant Professor of Human Geography, Durham University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar in between politics, Urban and Political Geography, and Middle East studies. She writes about questions of memory, archiving, (geo)poetics of space, infrastructure and affective and material aspects of cities. Her research has focused on post-colonial/post-independence Cairo, the aesthetics and poetics used to represent and depict Arab cities, and space and memory work in Egypt.

Keynote Speakers