CCSRE Faculty Research Network: Arab Futures and Pasts: Palestine+

Two-Day Workshop: April 15-16

Space is not merely a physical setting. It is also a political, cultural, linguistic, and historical formation. It is produced, ordered, governed, symbolized, and contested through both material and discursive practices, while urban form, infrastructure, territorial power, displacement, and violence shape the conditions of collective life. At stake, then, is not only the organization of built environments, but the broader spatial logics through which authority, exclusion, mobility, and belonging are constituted.

This workshop takes seriously the relation between space and language. Space is not only built, administered, and destroyed; it is also named, narrated, imagined, and conceptually organized. Concepts such as city, territory, border, dwelling, ruin, mobility, and belonging are historically and culturally mediated, and the languages through which they are articulated help shape the lived experience of space itself. Different linguistic and cultural formations may therefore generate distinct spatial imaginaries, as well as different ways of inhabiting, ordering, and resisting space.

The workshop opens a comparative inquiry into urbanity, spatial violence, and counter-spatial practices across diverse contexts, including Palestine, imperial formations, metropolitan systems, and racialized urban change. More broadly, it invites reflection on the relations among space, language, politics, and culture, asking how spatial and linguistic orders produce distinct forms of life, conflict, and resistance.

The workshop is organized in collaboration with guest researcher Abdalla Bayyari, a researcher in political geography and settler colonial studies at the Institute for Palestine Studies and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Palestine Studies. His research examines the spatial logics of settler colonialism, with a particular focus on territory, urbicide, and the production of space in Palestine. His work explores how colonial power operates through infrastructure, urban destruction, and territorial reorganization, and how anti-colonial spatial practices emerge under conditions of extreme spatial violence.

We warmly welcome anyone interested in attending the workshop, with RSVP required. We are also open to considering participation from researchers whose work speaks to these themes, whether through leading a session or sharing relevant materials. To inquire about participating, please contact Jadkiada@stanford.edu.