Paper short abstract

“Continuing” (Istimrar) and bearing witness—despite, beyond, and because of one’s unbearable pain and grief—represent both a choice and a fate for Palestinians. This orientation stems from being part of something larger than mortal life and forms a distinct ontology of Palestinian life.

Paper long abstract

“This is our fate and this is our choice. This is our life on this land, in this mortal world... from God we came and to God we return. We choose this life—before Hamza and after Hamza—and we will continue.”

These words were pronounced by Al Jazeera correspondent Wael Al-Dahdouh as he bid farewell to his son Hamza, himself a journalist, who was killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. Hamza’s martyrdom came just months after Al-Dahdouh buried two of his younger children, wife and grandson. At the burial site, Al-Dahdouh was filmed saying: “They are taking revenge by killing our children. Maʿlesh. To God we belong and to God we return.” The word maʿlesh has since been circulated as an expression of Palestinian steadfastness, in graffiti, on t-shirts, and across media commentaries. While often translated as “never mind” or “it can’t be helped,” maʿlesh does not signal resignation but articulates an ethics of endurance—one that holds grief, dignity, and spirituality together, without denying the brutal settler-colonial violence that necessitates them.

"Continuing" beyond and because of unbearable loss—is also not merely an individual heroic response to pain. "Continuing", by virtue of being part of an order and a will larger than the mortal one, functions as a central psychic and embodied infrastructure, forming an ontology of Palestinian life. Fate and choice are not oppositional terms but mutually constitutive orientations through which life is sustained amid genocidal violence.

Paper short abstract

Through ethnography of Bosnian highland returnees, I consider genocide as chronocide: a protracted unweaving of communal & more-than-human temporal relations. I trace nationalist distemporalising violence & the fragile labour of antigenocidal reweaving through return, ritual & cyclical time.

Paper long abstract

More than three decades after the destruction of their towns, landscapes and communities, small groups of returnees to the Dinaric Bosnian highlands remain the timekeepers of an erased world. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, this paper approaches genocide as a protracted unweaving of communal temporal relations – seasonal cycles, ritual calendars, neighbourly rhythms, and more-than-human cosmologies – through which lifeworlds were once held together.

I start by sketching out the main features of nationalist distemporalising violence, as it latched onto the communities, with attention to the reappropriation of the traditional cyclical calendar and the constructions of the ‘wounded history-ominous future’ ideological complex employed to perpetuate the genocidal regime. Chronocide, I suggest, is neither straightforward nor immediate; it slowly and insidiously fabricates new worlds out of the fragments of those it destroys. Usurped time thus haunts it intrinsically, always pointing to the anti-syntactic quality of dislocated temporal fragments lodged into new relations.

Attending to agriculture, feasts, rebuilding efforts and everyday sociality, I trace how returnees labour to reweave these relations under conditions of ongoing structural denial and genocidal governance. In other words, I ask what it is that the returnees keep returning to, and why some entanglements matter more than others in their quests for healing.

Genocide operates through both obliteration and a deep reconfiguration of the targeted world; its chronocidal aspect includes the colonisation of temporal ecologies and orientations, as well as the counterfeit repurposing of their rubbles. Yet, the rubbles are neither abandoned nor silent.

Paper short abstract

Drawing from over ten years of collaborative work with archivists in Gaza, this will be a study on what archives mean for those tasked with shaping them, and for those of us who rely on them to approach history and memory.

Paper long abstract

Annihilation is a process, fluctuating in speed. It drones. Bombards. Burns. Thermobaric waves of heat. And it plunders. These will be initial notes on the ongoing genocide of archivists and archives in Gaza. It is a reflection on the location of archives in the histories of Palestine and its peoples, and on the ways in which archive-making is a ground on which the very stakes of peoplehood have been fought against settler-colonial invasion. Drawing from over ten years of collaborative work with archivists in Gaza, this will be a study on what archives mean for those tasked with shaping them, and for those of us who rely on them to approach history and memory. In thinking of these collections and their caretakers, I aim to question how and why archives remain such a crucial modality for historical reckoning, how do they disappear, and how might we consider such a reckoning without them?

Paper short abstract

This paper connects proto-colonial legal and scientific species-making in 18th-century Senegambia with the unweaving of ecological and social relations, and explores griot storytelling as antigenocidal reweaving that challenges genocidal hierarchies embedded in international law.

Paper long abstract

This paper situates the genealogies of international legal thought within the targeted unweaving of relational worlds in 18th-century proto-colonial Senegambia, where emergent legal and natural sciences produced hierarchical, racialised and gendered conceptions of the human and more-than-human. Through historical analysis, I trace how species-making operated as a form of relational unweaving, diminishing ecological, social and sensorial ties in ways that prefigure enduring extractive and epistemic violences. These violences resonate with contemporary formulations of genocidal unweaving: the systematic fraying of relationalities that sustain water, land, language, kinship and life itself.

Foregrounding the lifeworlds and storytelling practices of griots (jeliw), whose gender-nonconformity and wordsmithery were integral to Senegambian worldings, the paper attends to practices of relational (re)weaving that persist despite legal and colonial orders of classification and control. Griot storytelling appears as a form of antigenocidal labour, a reiterative reweaving of social and more-than-human relations that resists the ontological and epistemic violences of species-making.

In dialogue with the panel’s emphasis on genocidal durations and the (im)possibilities of refusal, care and return, I argue that transspecies/ecorelational justice must confront law’s complicity in unweaving relations it (sometimes, selectively) purports to remedy. Rather than presuming law’s salvific capacities, this paper urges serious engagement with embodied, situated practices of world-making that persistently reweave relations targeted by hierarchical orders, offering pathways towards refusal and enduring relational survival.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnography with Rohingya diaspora, I trace a genocidal continuum beyond 2017, foregrounding regenerative antigenocidal practices through hospitality, micro-charity, self-education, and self-recognition projects: costly yet vital amid protracted genocidal risk.

Paper long abstract

While international recognition often centres on 2017, Rohingya qom (“people”) narrate longer histories: accumulations of undoing that have severed kinship relations and belonging (to Arakanese land and to the Burmese polity) alongside the denial of Rohingya ethnicity, and refusals to recognise a variegated portrait of Rohingya suffering as such. For those chronically displaced, immobilisation, illegalisation, and the unrealities of UN-touted “durable solutions” permeate the everyday.

Drawing on two years of doctoral ethnographic fieldwork with Rohingya in diaspora (UK/US), I trace, through oral histories, photographs, and a collaborative embroidered (fultola) cartographic project, multi-generational family trajectories across serial expulsions (1940s/1970s/1990s/2010s) from Arakan/Rakhine to Bangladesh, India/Pakistan, the Gulf, and onward to the Global North. Across these routes, close kin remain in camps, disappear in Myanmar, or are lost at sea; ocánti (ongoing unrest) is experienced relationally, and family reunification remains structurally foreclosed, rendering “healing” suspended.

This continuum of genocidal violence operates by eroding not only bodies and relations, but the imaginability and doability of relations themselves – debilitating capacities for caring for self-and-others and for producing authorised knowledge of self-history/ identity (along with recognition of Rohingya as capable carers/knowers). Against these foreclosures, I foreground cross-border regenerative labours: reversals of care’s directionality via hospitality/foodways; redistributive micro-charities that scaffold other Rohingya care projects; diaspora-led education to salvage a ‘lost generation’; and portable infrastructures of self-recognition (via self-sovereign identity systems). Yet these quieter infrastructures are costly: under scarcity, those sustaining regeneration face depletion. I argue for urgently resourcing these labours of regeneration amid enduring genocidal risk.

Paper short abstract

From a kitchen-table desire for "mir u duši" to Višegrad’s negationist landscapes, I trace genocidal logic as an assault on facticity that demands proof. Against healing-as-closure, I propose healing-as-refusal: antigenocidal reweaving amid ongoing annihilation, from Bosnia to Palestine—carefully

Paper long abstract

A question at a kitchen table in (perpetual) exile: “what do you desire?”

The answer—collectively personal, non-clinical—returns: “mir u duši.”

Almost immediately, a demand arrives to make it “concrete”: name the nightmares, the scenes; produce the legible wound.

This paper begins there, where a desire-for-healing is interpellated by a pedagogy of admissibility—where “healing” is morphed into measurable improvement, therapeutic statecraft, and the correct narrative-form. That interruption is spatio-temporally enmeshed in Višegrad’s (and Eastern Bosnia’s) negationist landscapes: “genocide” ground off a memorial; a ‘spa’ reopened after functioning as a sexual torture site; Andrićgrad’s ethnonationalist “Renaissance,” performing innocence. These are denial-techniques that target the possibilities of facticity: what is recognised as a wound, a crime, a grievable death; who is believed, what becomes actionable.

Wrestling with the provocation that “Genocide is not a fact,” I analyse this as genocidal logic: an enduring violence that assaults the conditions of proof and then demands proof; that unweaves world-relations—land, burial, kinship, language—and then requires “recovery” within the very order that persists. The archive is summoned as remedy, yet refusal must be uttered from within history. An impossible provocation.

From that “impossibility”, a possible reframing emerges: healing-as-refusal. Not closure or reconciliation’s timetable, but antigenocidal reweaving. A fidelity to the seemingly unresolvable that refuses to be defanged. Refusing (negating) negationism the right to dictate the terms of care, mourning, and futurity. I end by gesturing—carefully, without analogy—toward Palestine, as a condition of the world, where demands to narrate, to prove, to “move away-and-on,” circulate amid ongoing annihilation.