Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how indigenous Palestinian food knowledge moves across agrarian and urban landscapes, showing how oral histories reveal ecological mobility, cultural resilience, and decolonial pathways that sustain agrarian and culinary practices.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how indigenous food knowledge functions as a dynamic form of agrarian mobility and urban resilience within the broader political ecology of Palestine under conditions of war, siege, and colonial fragmentation. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and oral histories, the research traces how farmers, women, and community cooks navigate disrupted geographies of land, resources, and movement to sustain food production and cultural continuity amid intensifying violence and dispossession.

Focusing on practices such as seed saving, foraging, rain-fed subsistence farming, and communal food preparation, the study reveals how these forms of knowledge move across rural and urban spaces—circulating between fields, kitchens, refugee camps, and informal networks—to create pluralistic “floodways” of nourishment and care in moments when formal food systems collapse. The contemporary revival of Al-Takaya, community-based kitchens rooted in Arab-Islamic traditions, exemplifies how collective food knowledge becomes a critical infrastructure of mutual aid and survival during wartime scarcity, siege, and displacement.

Engaging with decolonial political ecology and agrarian studies, the paper argues that food knowledge operates simultaneously as a material and epistemic resource that counters the racialized control of land, labor, and mobility imposed by settler colonialism. Oral history, as both method and praxis, illuminates how Palestinians regenerate agrarian memory and sustain intergenerational cultural resilience despite the violent ruptures of war. Ultimately, the paper positions indigenous culinary and agrarian knowledge as a vital site for rethinking the agrarian question in Palestine—one that foregrounds everyday acts of survival, adaptation, and resistance that challenge colonial ecologies of domination.

Presentation short abstract

Grassroots acts in Ramallah-Al-Bireh’s streets, Palestine, reclaim the (right of way) as spatial justice. Against settler-colonial land grabs and car-centric neoliberal planning, these micro-practices form a bottom-up urbanism, reimagining streets as sites of civic life and self-determination

Presentation long abstract

In the Palestinian context of multi-layered spatial violence, where settler-colonialism enforces land appropriation and fragmentation, and centralized neoliberal planning regimes enforce a car-centric logic that erodes public space, this paper seeks to reclaim the (right of way) as a profound social, collective, and political right integral to the struggle for the (right to the city.)

Focusing on the streetscape of Ramallah-Al-Bireh, where communal life is systematically erased under a dual pressure of colonial domination over resources and the internalization of top-down neoliberal planning models, the study poses a central question: how can grassroots, micro-level practices re-appropriate constrained urban infrastructure to restore the street as a physical site of resistance, memory, and spatial justice?

Employing an ethnographic methodology attuned to fragmented everyday acts under layered oppression, the research traces scattered tactics such as spontaneous sidewalk gatherings, murals, and community events. These practices reveal a dual claim: the right to remain amidst colonial erasure and the right to liveable space amid privatized, vehicle-centric governance.

Building on feminist political ecology and participatory design, the paper argues that these micro-practices constitute emergent seeds of a scalable, bottom-up spatial justice framework. This framework reimagines streets not as mere conduits, but as crucial terrains where civic life is nurtured and autonomous self-determination is performed daily.

The study thus contributes to global debates on urban resistance and decolonial praxis, highlighting pathways to democratize public space where such democratization is most violently contested in cities caught between the clamp of colonial spatial repression and market-led urbanism

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines Israeli colonial herding in the occupied West Bank, where animals—sheep, goats, and cows—are deployed as instruments of frontier expansion. It explores how this practice appropriates, instrumentalizes, and weaponizes indigenous pastoral traditions to eliminate Palestinian life.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the emergent phenomenon of Israeli colonial herding outposts in the occupied West Bank, whereby animals – sheep, goats and cows – are deployed as a method for frontier expansion. Specifically, the paper interrogates the ways in which colonial herding operates through appropriation, instrumentalization, and weaponization of indigenous pastoral practices and animal bodies as means to erase and replace Palestinian life and lifeways. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Palestinian shepherding communities at the forefront of frontier violence and drawing on theorizations across the fields of Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and political geography and ecology, the paper unravels the logics underlying colonial herding and the eliminatory geographies it produces. It argues that colonial herding responds to settler-capitalist logics that transform animals into ‘colonial subjects’ whose mobility is weaponized and instrumentalized drawing an elastic and expansive frontier – a wandering frontier. The paper concludes with Palestinian pastoralist resistances to colonial herding, spotlighting decolonial openings through positioning Al-Ard (the land) as a relational, symbiotic and grounded site of Indigenous struggle and knowledge production.

Presentation short abstract

In this paper, I trace the ebbs and flows of agrarian mobility in the West Bank amidst the infestation of wild boars. I aim to map out indigenous, feminist, and grounded modes of endurance and adaptations, showcasing the multiple ways Palestinian villages have struggled to sustain mobility.

Presentation long abstract

Ebbs and Flows of Palestinian Agrarian Mobility amidst an Infestation:

Indigenous Ecologies and Feminist Resilience in the Palestinian Highlands of the West Bank

Entangled changes in Land and Labor, in the highlands of the West Bank, helps us recognize the impartial proleteranization of Palestinian peasants in the West bank.

Kohlbry suggests that the colonial political economy has relegated seasonal rain-fed agriculture to a subordinate source of income. Conversely, Tesdell emphasizes the persistence, durability, unpredictability, and fluctuating nature of Ba'al farming in semi-arid Palestine, making it an enduring practice that defies narrow metrics and representations prevalent within developmental discourses.

This emphasis on the agro-ecology of land and labor regimes, in the West Bank, is all-important. However, it shies away from the centrality of agrarian mobility, namely Siraha (walks, hykes, foraging, Faz’a and Ouneh). it also ignores an indigenous environmental perspective, rooted in the political ecology of agrarian Palestine.

Research Questions:

1-How can we examine Palestinian agrarian mobility, as an embodied decolonial praxis?

2-To what extent does the infestation of wild boars, and the knowledge produced about it, help us trace ebbs, flows, resistance, resilience, associated with agrarian mobility?

3-Can we devise agrarian, feminist, decolonial scales and practices that inform an agrarian present for the purposes of surviving the current genocidal wave?

Methods:

This paper will be based on multi-sited ethnographic work, conducted from 2017-2023, in the villages of Salfit, with focus on Iskaka village.