Presentation short abstract

The paper revives silenced histories and world-making practices in Deir Alla to expose and unmake imperial and Zionist settler-colonial myths. Using mixed media and critical cartography, it recenters indigenous relational knowledge to imagine anticolonial, life-affirming futures.

Presentation long abstract

Social, ecological, and spatial injustices in Deir Alla -a province in the Jordan Valley- emerge from long histories of imperial and Zionist settler-colonial violence perpetuated through capitalist and modernist systems. While these formations manifest-in and transform our material world, they also rest on hegemonic myths, invading our perception and delimiting our ways of being. Following Sylvia Wynter’s invitation to “unmake” and “remake” our world(s), this work situates agency in practices of remembering, and carefully selecting from collective memory as a means of restor(y)ing suppressed narratives and practices.

This re-narration recognizes the ongoing erasure of indigenous life-worlds in Bilad Al-Sham and illuminates relational ontologies that prove to be recalcitrant to obliteration. Those seen through daily and organized efforts in Deir Alla—primarily women-led—that counter colonial-capitalist ruptures. This remaking praxis is seen as reworlding forms reactivating repressed indigenous knowledge-systems. Such forms endure by exceeding the material forms, persisting through intangible, embodied, and relational modes of doing and being with human and non-human worlds.

By foregrounding alternative ontological frames and reactivating memory as a method, and grounded in Soja’s spatial theorization of justice, the paper employs critical cartography with creative methods revealing these dynamics. Thus, challenging dominant historiographies of the Jordan Valley and proposing a renewed interpretive space in which indigenous values and ecological attunement can be re-centered. In doing so, it argues for an anticolonial re-making of narratives and geographies that recognize the vitality of what has been silenced and suppressed and opens possibilities for more just and life-affirming futures.