Presentation short abstract

This paper examines rhythms and ruptures in land-based pastoral practice as it persists through and against settler colonial violence in the occupied West Bank. By focusing on plants, water, and seasons, to show how shepherds and animals navigate settler colonialism’s endemic drive ‘out of season’

Presentation long abstract

This article examines rhythms and ruptures in Indigenous everyday land-based practices as they persist through and against settler colonial violence. Centering the praxis of pastoral communities in the occupied West Bank, it explores how shepherds and animals navigate the cyclical changes of plants, water, weather, and seasons amid volatile settler colonial geographies marked by displacement, fragmentation, compartmentalization, and environmental destruction. Grounded in ethnographic and embodied methods—including interviews with pastoral community members and walking with shepherds—the study draws on literature in vegetal geographies, atmospheres/weathers, settler colonial studies, and Indigenous studies. Focusing on three deeply entangled aspects central to pastoralism—plants, water, and seasons—it demonstrates how settler colonialism operates as a persistent disruption of elemental rhythms, an endemic force ‘out of season.’