Mapping the Erasure

Starting at al ‘Arub refugee camp in the West Bank and moving between the territories Israel occupied in 1948 and in 1967 as well as the Palestinian refugee camps, we see a geography unfold which remains prone to rupture and transformation. Hashem Abushama addresses the significance of understanding the multiple Palestinian geographies and how it is a map without guarantees: where there is neither a guarantee that settler colonialism’s intent to eliminate the Palestinians will succeed, nor a guarantee that Palestinians will take up a particular form of resistance. This already constitutes a socio-spatial practice that pays attention to rehearsals of Palestinian return in a context of genocidal violence and dispossession.

But aren’t the production and erasure of maps part of the very same systems of power and exploitation? Why do alternative maps or counter maps matter? After his talk, Hashem Abushama will be joined in conversation by Annelys de Vet, Chiara de Cesari and Eleri Connick to discuss these questions and practices of resistance.

About the speakers  

Hashem Abushama is an Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford. He holds a DPhil in Human Geography and an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Peace and Global Studies from Earlham College in the United States. He is also a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin as well as a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies. He has authored several academic and journalistic articles on dispossession, arts, urbanization, the archives, and postcolonial Marxism. 

Annelys de Vet is a designer, researcher, and educator with a practice for long-term, participatory design projects that engage with social and political struggles. She is the founder of Subjective Editions, a publishing initiative that maps regions from the inside out through the perspectives of their inhabitants. She has also co-founded Disarming Design from Palestine, a platform for thought-provoking design that develops artisanal products from Palestine to convey alternative narratives about life under occupation. De Vet recently completed her PhD Disarming Desing, Politics of Participatory Practices at ARIA (Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts). Currently she teaches at Sint Lucas School of Arts in Antwerp at the Socio-Political masters context.  

Chiara De Cesari is Professor of Heritage, Memory and Cultural Studies, and Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her wide-ranging research explores how forms of memory, heritage, art, and cultural politics are shifting under contemporary conditions of post- and decoloniality, globalization and state transformation. An important strand of her research examines how artists and activists are reclaiming and reinventing cultural institutions. She is the author of Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (Stanford UP, 2019), and co-editor of two key volumes in memory studies (Transnational Memory, de Gruyter, 2014; European Memory in Populism, Routledge, 2019). 

Eleri Connick (moderator) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam’s School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. She was the PhD Fellow at Darat al Funun (Amman) February 2023 – July 2023. Her doctoral project titled: “The Materiality of Exile in Jordan: The Palestinian House”, proposes a radical conceptualisation of home and all that it can provoke to ground her work both conceptually and methodologically. 

The image is borrowed from Annelys de Vet’s The Subjective Atlas of Palestine (2013).