Contribution short abstract

The extremities of climate inequality as byproducts of a colonial social relation predispose billions of people to immediate harm. Existing climate solutions proposed by the ruling class actively normalize genocidal acts on surplus populations, while reserving adaptation to a privileged few.

Contribution long abstract

When billionaire Bill Gates announced in an essay prior to the convening of the 30th Conference of the Parties of the UN climate deliberations in Belem, Brazil that climate change is not an existential risk to humanity, he makes a telling confession not only of who counts as "humanity" but also of a growing tendency towards what Ajay Singh Chaudhury (2024) calls "right wing climate realism." This stance characterizes a "cornucopia" of positions ranging from liberal and progressive social democrats to the conservative far-right, normalizing a status quo where the investments of the wealthiest 0.1% of humanity produce more emissions in a single day than the annual emissions of 50% of all of humanity (Oxfam International, 2025). On track towards 3 degrees Celsius of warming, right wing climate realism condemns billions of people to deadly climate-induced risk and social instability while restricting climate adaptation to a privileged few. In this intervention, we explore how sustainability discourses prop up a genocidal world ecology, dangerously inflated with the Malthusian longtermist agendas of the ruling class. We demonstrate how the meaning of existential risk is reserved to climate adaptation for a certain subset of humanity and has become a central framework for new environmental pragmatists (Spash, 2015). This requires creative strategies to justify not only eco-apartheid (Heron, 2024) but even mass murder more broadly, as evident in the ongoing genocide in Gaza and Sudan to normalizing disposability from Haiti to the DR Congo and beyond, as central to the mainstream environmental agenda.

Contribution short abstract

Doing with people amid genocide resists the overwriting of lifeworlds, towards rupturing the humanitarian rubric that deny the right to resist. Much more than perfect victims, Palestinian lifeworlds in academic spaces must exist. To reject paralysis is to claim a worldmaking of liberation.

Contribution long abstract

To speak in times of genocide is a task of a threshold of resisting a process of overwriting a history, a people, and an entire lifeworlds of a population. To maintain a process of resisting erasure, it is imperative to move beyond a mono-representation of a population under genocide by concretely offering support in one’s own specialization: public talks, workshops, courses, scholarships, to name a few. Departing from there cements a crucial step in not only escaping but also disrupting one of the most, among many, mainstream depictions and ways of ‘help’ through humanitarian rubric. Palestinians are not perfect victims and simultaneously not meta-humans: a departure that entails worlds of resistance, sumud, existence and beings of the colonized, and a premise that sets the starting point to being unapologetic, in academic spaces and pages and beyond, about the rights of the colonized to resist (by all means), to have the capacity (full capacity) to feel and express without deemed uncredible, and most importantly, to have a voice and speak for themselves. In setting a continuity for a revolutionary Palestinian-ness and beyond, it is rather indispensable to reject a departure from paralysis and helplessness (one objective, among many, of colonial violence); to moving beyond to a world of creating, owning, collectivizing, and, above all, claiming a worldmaking rooted in justice, solidarity, liberation, and becoming.

Contribution short abstract

Based on ‘Sustainability Fantasies/Genocidal Realities: Palestine Against an Eco-Apartheid World’ co-authored with Vijay Kolinjivadi which critically analyses what the death of the international liberal order means for a world increasingly descending into climate upheaval and eco-apartheid.

Contribution long abstract

Published one year after the start of the genocide in Gaza, 'Sustainability Fantasies/Genocidal Realities: Palestine Against an Eco-Apartheid World’ co-authored with Vijay Kolinjivadi positioned the resistance and sumud of Palestinians in Gaza as the frontline in the struggle against US-led imperialism and global ecofascism and eco-apartheid. This remains true more than two years on from October 2023, when global powers are scrambling to occupy Gaza amidst a false ceasefire violated daily by the zionist state.

Gaza remains the linchpin of imperialism in the middle east, and on a cultural level, it has awakened and inspired progressive forces around the world through its stubborn commitment to land, liberation and dignity against the occupier. Left movements globally have been reinvigorated and are internalising the lessons taught by Gaza - building power from below. This intervention will focus on current and historical examples of ecological anti-imperialist struggles that resist structures of eco-apartheid, from Palestine, the Arab region, and beyond.

Contribution short abstract

This roundtable contribution examines the importance of anti-oppression critical theoretical poetics for holding radical space against panic liberalism, for unsettling social scientology, and for anti-imperialist movement building against global apartheids.

Contribution long abstract

My contribution to this roundtable discussion responds to the three questions posed:

1) Our role in times of genocide: Building on my experience a member of the Faculty 4 Palestine Collective and as a vice chair of the University of Alberta’s Race Equity Council, responding to anti-EDI campaigns, I will offer an overview of my ongoing subaltern movement oriented research and teaching praxis involving regenerative molecular media which seek to radicalize the pluriversal turn in the social sciences so that it does not regress into mere cultural relativism and diversity-of-oppressions management by new formations of panic liberalism.

2) Unsettling onto-theological and epistemic hegemonies: In order to delink from the colonizers’ model of the world, I argue, we need the historiographical poetics of anti-oppression critical theory (which theorizes historically, in media res), its genealogical hermeneutics of skepticism (which investigates which oppression a given theory or concept descends from as its rationalization) and its mycelial decompositional-regenerative poetics of theorizing (which places names given to the world by masters and authorities under mycelial “erasure” and invents new names through intermedia research-creation).

3) Moving beyond paralysis: No environmental or social justice is now possible without anti-fascist mass movements and yet the social engineering of anti-fascist popular culture by Gutenberg experts is by definition impossible. Consequently, moving beyond paralysis requires speculative molecular media building on the anti-imperialist critical-theoretical traditions of the global south if we are to escape the dead ends of north-centred minimalist nowtopias, green new deals and ongoing imperialist war.

Contribution short abstract

The weaponization of the Wadi Gaza River, evidence of genocide and ecocide, reveals hydro-hegemonic infrastructures that dominate water flow and sever Palestine’s geography. In the midst of Israel’s expansionist genocide, this project is more urgent and politically relevant than ever.

Contribution long abstract

This iterative study investigates the cartographic disappearance of the Wadi Gaza river, undertaking a political mapping of engineered deathscapes and ecocide along the course of the riverbed. It opens towards a spatial imaginary of counter-cartography where the impounded and diverted flow of the river no longer stops at the besieged border of the so-called Gaza Strip. While the extent of data voids and gaps are deliberate manifestations of distorted militarized imaging of the landscape, rainfall calls the phantom river back to life as floodwaters break through concealed terrains of a sinister network of hydro-hegemonic infrastructures. Yet, infrastructure is designed to fail as disconnected electricity flows shock the immobilized river into another condition of stagnation. Between the gaps of the border-fence, infrastructure is weaponized to be cut and fragmented as a deliberate strategy of withdrawal occurs that engineers an unlivable and abandoned terrain. Cartographic authority conditions the reappearance of the exiled river in a terrain of genocide. The starved riverbed is circulated on maps of a new geography of settler-coloniality, seen on fleeting images on mobile phones or as pamphlets that rain from an occupied sky.

Even in obstructed movement, the river manifests as a temporal agent, capable of producing a condition of flood that ruptures static futures of catastrophe towards an unyielding progression of refusal and return. Within obsessive exercises that map the disappeared river's potential movements, material overflows through and between the cartographic gaps: in videos, images, and song, as a spatial testimony of insurgency that resists cartography.

Contribution short abstract

This presentation proposes considering the Midddle Eastern city as a more-than-human index. Drawing on literary experiments emerging from the region, I attempt at charting a more-than-human story telling of urban political ecologies intertwined with ongoing colonial violence.

Contribution long abstract

This presentation proposes considering the Midddle Eastern city as a more-than-human index. This proposition stems of from the question what does a city hold in terms of spatial, temporal, material, social, human and more-than human and affective resource to come to terms with a world that seems to on the cusp of betraying it (and us)? One of the luring ideas that often emerge as an answer is the idea of “the city as an archive” from which narration and storytelling, or futurity becomes possible. This is a proposition where the materialities of the city-- the built, the fabricated, the found, the carried and the circulated—hold a restorative or redemptive quality, a clue to a story. If the city is an archive for how we script ourselves in it, then how can we read it as it slips away? I suggest that one way to reckon with these questions, is to consider an idiom without which the archive cannot not exist: an index. I arrive to the city-as-index through a wayward urban trek, first the ground, then an explosion, and finally severed bodies. The three idioms emerge from three literary experiments by the Egyptian poet and writer Iman Mersal (2018), the Iraqi poet and writer Sinan Antoun (2013?), and the Egyptian writer Haytham El Werdany (2023). Not only do these works flirt with the archival lure, but through this playing with space, they foreground the question of the thingness of storytelling, the material, the more-than-human composition of the space.