Study explores how life continues amid annihilation
The study focused on three elements: the construction of makeshift toilets in tents camps, inventive ways to collect water and manage the water supply, and ad hoc power generation to attend to complete power cuts. These ephemeral infrastructures exist because of the urgent necessity to maintain life amid destruction.
The research focuses on the material practices of people living in contexts of chronic violence and war.
“Fitful infrastructures highlight the fragility and volatility of infrastructures without glorifying them. They show infrastructures to be material manifestations of life that cannot be reduced to the aims of the settler state,” Dader and Joronen say.
The article is part of Dader’s doctoral research project “Homemaking on Top of the Ashes: Gazans’ Routinised Dwelling Practices in Spaces of Elimination”, which is part of the European Research Council (ERC) project “Dwelling with Crisis: Home at Spaces of Chronic Violence (HOMCRI)”. In his PhD research, Dader studies everyday life in Gaza amid ongoing violence. The research looks at how Palestinians continually construct, reconstruct, and adapt their dwellings in such conditions and extreme engineered practices.
“Against the backdrop of Israel’s ongoing and intensified attacks on Gaza, our research provides valuable insights into the politics of infrastructure, settler-colonial violence, and humanitarian survival. It thus encourages a deeper understanding of survival as not merely unmatched resilience, but as an ongoing material negotiation with destruction,” Dader and Joronen explain.
“Life in Gaza represents a stubborn insistence on creating conditions for survival even while those conditions are constantly and violently being erased,” the researchers say.
The peer-reviewed research article was published in the Antipode journal.
Research article
Dader, K. and Joronen, M. (2025), Fitful Infrastructures: Dwelling with Infrastructural Elimination in Gaza. Antipode, 57: 886-906.
Contact Information:
Khalid Dader
+358 504 726 228
khalid.dader [at] tuni.fi
