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.