LSE Department of Sociology Presents
Decolonising and the Question of Palestine
Friday, 21 May 2021
1:00 PM EDT
Speakers
Rana Barakat is assistant professor of history and contemporary Arab studies at Birzeit University in Palestine. 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 is currently completing a book monograph, The Buraq Revolt: Constructing a History of Resistance in Palestine, which argues that this 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. She is currently working on a second book monograph titled Lifta and Resisting the Museumification of Palestine: Indigenous History of the Nakba, 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.
Muna Dajani holds a PhD from the Department of Geography and Environment at LSE. Her PhD research aimed to examine the distinctive livelihood practices by which water use and farming acquire political subjectivity in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights and Al Battuf Valley in the Galilee. She is now the Research Officer in a collaboration project between Birzeit University, LSE and Al Marsad entitled ‘Mapping Memories of Resistance: the untold story of the occupation of the Golan Heights’
Dr. Mezna Qato is historian of the modern Middle East, and in particular of migration, development, and social histories of Palestinian refugee and exile communities. She was previously a Spencer Fellow at the National Academy of Education, and Junior Research Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge. She is currently completing a book on the history of education for Palestinians. Her research and teaching interests centre on histories and theories of social, economic and political transformation amongst refugee and stateless communities, the politics and practice of archives, and global micro-histories of movements and collectivities in the Middle East. She also co-convenes the Archives of the Disappeared Research Network at the Margaret Anstee Centre and the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities. Dr. Qato can be reached at mq212@cam.ac.uk
Omar Jabary Salamanca is an urban geographer and Marie Curie Postdoc fellow currently based at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He is also affiliated to the Middle East and North Africa Research Group at Ghent University. His work lies at the intersection of urban studies, settler colonialism, political economy and Middle East studies. Drawing on the histories and geographies of road and electricity infrastructure in Palestine, his dissertation examined the ways these socio-technical networks are constructed, imagined and governed but also how they are experienced and contested. Currently he is revising his dissertation into a book manuscript. Recent work considers colonial and post-colonial geographies of infrastructure, settler urbanism, theories of socio-materiality, urban political ecology, energy politics as well as social movements and resistance. Omar has published several scholarly articles, books chapters and edited compilations on themes related to urban infrastructures, settler colonialism, development and politics. He is editorial board member of the journal Antipode, contributor to the Jadaliyya Cities Page Network, member of the steering committee of the International Critical Geography Group, and programmer for Eye On Palestine Arts and Film Festival and Palestine Cuts series.
Fran Tonkiss is Professor of Sociology, and Head of Department. Her research and teaching is in the fields of urban and economic sociology. Her research interests focus on urban inequalities, urban development and design, social and spatial divisions, and the socio-economic organisation of urban space. Publications in these fields include Cities by Design: the social life of urban form (Polity, 2013), Space, the City and Social Theory (Polity, 2005), and Contemporary Economic Sociology: Globalisation, Production, Inequality (Routledge, 2006). She is the co-author of Market Society: Markets and Modern Social Theory (Polity, 2001, with Don Slater), and co-editor of Trust and Civil Society (Macmillan, 2000, with Andrew Passey). She is currently managing editor of Economy and Society; she was previously an editor of the British Journal of Sociology, and remains a member of the editorial board. Tonkiss supervises doctoral students undertaking research on urban development, the economic and spatial structuring of cities, urban economies and inequalities.