The Center for Racial Justice

When: Wednesday, January 05

Where: Humanities 1, Room 210

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The Center for Racial Justice is very proud to sponsor the second annual Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement series! Please join us for the following talk with Nour Joudah:

Palestine Is the Countermap

Date: Wednesday, 11/5

Time: 3 pm

Location: Humanities 1, Room 210

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The Palestinian experience, like that of many indigenous peoples, is one unbound by time; it occupies a simultaneity of temporalities in any given moment and is constantly finding ways to escape the settler colonial temporal trap. Decolonial praxis in the production of present and future spaces can range from operationalizing colonial archives to the remappings of destroyed towns. But in this moment of heightened genocide, this presentation argues that the most significant countermap to settler imaginaries and violence is Palestine itself. Beyond the rhetorical or symbolic power of the incredible survival of Palestinians, Palestine as a physical space (and the Gaza Strip in particular) stands as a living countermap that not only confronts and unsettles power relations with the Zionist regime, but serves as a counter-cartography on a global scale. 

Nour Joudah is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA and a former President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at UC-Berkeley (2022-23). Dr. Joudah’s work examines mapping practices and indigenous survival and futures in settler states, highlighting how indigenous countermapping is a both cartographic and decolonial praxis. She also has a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University.