Resistant Energy

These frameworks and infrastructures are subject to particular dynamics in a digital context which the panel will explore. As international legal institutions such as the ICC and ICJ intervene in unprecedented ways, we ask how these shifts recalibrate the global framing of Palestinian liberation—legitimizing perspectives from the Global South while also reinforcing imperial modes of governance. Concurrently, other vital global institutions, including universities, have become key battlegrounds where students and faculty engaged in Palestine solidarity efforts face increasing policing, surveillance, and repression. From bureaucratic restrictions and disciplinary actions to targeted harassment, the infrastructures of repression extend beyond state mechanisms, infiltrating educational spaces that have historically been sites of radical critique.  

Resistant Energy, a forthcoming booklet published by the Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI), forms the starting point of this event. The booklet compiles a year-long investigation into archival visuals of infrastructure and apartheid—from South Africa to Palestine—exploring the material and symbolic energies that sustain resistance. Our discussion explores the social and digital infrastructures that resist imperial forms of governance and institutional repression, mobilizing networks of solidarity and counter-surveillance. In this event, we hope to situate contemporary struggles within longer histories of decolonial resistance, tracing how infrastructures of power are both dismantled and repurposed in the fight for justice.  

About the speakers  

Jamil Fiorino-Habib is a researcher and lecturer in the Media Studies department at the University of Amsterdam specializing in the politics of aesthetics, temporality, and resistance. In tandem with their academic research, Jamil also works with a variety of grassroots collectives in the Netherlands where they help mobilize and organize political work centered around radical system change. 

Jill Toh is co-founder of the Racism and Technology Center, a non-profit based in the Netherlands. She is doing her PhD at the University of Amsterdam, and her work focuses on the intersections of law, labour, technology and power under racial capitalism. She is also actively organising with UvA Staff for Palestine. 

Miriyam Aouragh (Westminster University) is a profesor with a background in cultural anthropology and non-Western sociology and completed her PhD in 2008 at the UvA, on how the introduction of the internet related to the outbreak of mass uprisings in Palestine. Aouragh subsequently focused on the political role of new digital tools and spaces, and she has ethnographic fieldwork were conducted among grassroots activism in Lebanon and Palestine. Aouragh relates critical theory with online-offline dialects 

Omar Jabary Salamanca (ULB, Belgium), studies histories, geographies and theories of development, political economy, political ecology, and science and technology studies in colonial contexts. His work spans urban infrastructures, settler colonialism, and anti-colonial movements, culminating in a forthcoming book on the political lives of infrastructures in Palestine to be published by Verso Books. Formerly at Ghent and Columbia Universities, he’s held visiting fellowships at Sussex and SOAS. Salamanca contributes to multiple editorial and advisory boards, including Antipode and Jadaliyya Cities, and co-founded the Eye On Palestine Arts and Film Festival. 

Karl Moubarak is a designer and tool-builder whose practice is rooted in the digital sphere and focuses on the research, development, and social activation of experimental interfaces, infrastructures, and on and offline sites for exchange. Collaborates with artists, collectives, researchers, and cultural organisations on projects that pay critical attention to the processes, tools, and mechanisms that co-constitute them. Enjoys working with free, libre, and open-source software and hardware with a particular interest in accessibility, sustainability, and experimental methods of liveness and dissemination.