Registration Open for the 2026 BRISMES Annual Lecture with Rafeef Ziadah
Beyond Bearing Witness: Palestine, Knowledge Production and the Political Economy of the Future
BRISMES is pleased to invite members and non-members to attend the 2026 BRISMES Annual Lecture with Rafeef Ziadah.
The BRISMES Annual Lecture provides an opportunity for members and non-members to hear from a distinguished scholar or expert within the field of Middle Eastern Studies and is a major event in the BRISMES calendar. The lecture is free to attend and open to all, but registration is essential.
Date: Thursday, 12 November 2026
Time: 17:30 - 19:00 UK time
Location: Online via Zoom
About the Lecture
The current moment has generated an extraordinary volume of writing, testimony and documentation about Palestine. Much of this work is indispensable - naming and recording the conditions Palestinians are living through remains politically urgent. But there is also a need to ask what forms of analysis are required beyond description, and what knowledge production in solidarity with Palestine might mean at this conjuncture.
This presentation considers Palestine not only through the immediacy of destruction, but through the political and economic projects being assembled around it. It looks at infrastructures of regional integration, energy, logistics, reconstruction and normalisation, and at the ways these projects attempt to produce a particular future for Gaza and for the region more broadly. It asks what becomes visible when we analyse these processes together, and what forms of knowledge might help us think beyond both catastrophe and the political horizons being imposed in its aftermath.
Rafeef Ziadah is Senior Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy in the Department of International Development at King’s College London. Her research examines the political economy of South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), with a particular focus on maritime infrastructures, logistics, labour regimes, race and gender. Her recent work has addressed the genocide in Gaza, infrastructures of normalisation, energy transition, and the politics of reconstruction.
She is co-author, with Adam Hanieh and Robert Knox, of Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine (Verso, 2025), and co-editor, with Brenna Bhandar, of Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought (Verso, 2020). She is also an internationally recognised poet.