About me
I am a PhD fellow researcher at Tampere University, part of the project 'Dwelling with Crisis: Home at Spaces of Chronic Violence' (HOMCRI), with my project exploring Palestinian dwelling practices in spaces of elimination. I am an active member of:
- Geographies of Coloniality and Everyday Violence Research Group (GOCEP)
- Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG) at Tampere University
- Palestine Research Group at Tampere University
Research unit
Research fields
As an early-career scholar, my research interests are interdisciplinary and form on the intersection of political geography, human rights, and settler colonial studies. Rather than treating these fields as separate, I try to think with them together to better understand the social, spatial, and affective consequences of systemic and prolonged violence. Across my work, I am particularly interested in how colonial violence shapes everyday life, time, and subjectivity, and, in turn, how the oppressed navigate through and under this violence.
- Political and human geography of crisis
One of my primary research areas is the geography of elimination, in which I examine how physical spaces are transformed through military destruction, siege, and blockade, and how these processes withdraw the basic conditions necessary for life, and I explore how people navigate these spaces through what Mikko Joronen and I call “fitful infrastructures”, that is, fragile, temporary, and improvised practices that aim to sustain life under extreme constraint. I see this work as contributing to broader debates in political and regional geography on population management, displacement, and the deliberate erosion of ordinary life-supporting conditions.
- Settler colonialism and its multifaceted violence
Much of my analytical framework is informed by settler colonial theory. I look into the settler colonial violence and its versatility, with a certain focus on infrastructural, temporal, and atmospheric aspects of such violence, where fear, uncertainty, and scarcity become pervasive conditions rather than isolated events. In the context of Gaza, I am especially interested in how colonial infrastructures operate through time: how violence fragments linear, plannable futures and produces exhaustion, waiting, and suspended life. This perspective allows me to think about violence as something lived continuously, rather than episodically.
- Fundamentality of Education
A smaller, collaborative strand of my research engages with questions of education under settler-colonial violence, examining how schools, universities, and knowledge infrastructures are systematically targeted within broader regimes of elimination. In this work, I have had the privilege of collaborating with Tahani Aldahdouh, whose scholarship on education in Palestine and other contexts has been central to shaping the conceptual and empirical direction of this research, and with whom I contributed to two research outcomes.
Within this collaboration, I engaged with the concept of “scholasticide” (or “educide”) as a way of understanding how attacks on educational institutions and educators function as colonial strategies aimed at dismantling the conditions for learning, continuity, and collective futurity. Further, I took part in highlighting how educators in Gaza resist and navigate their education trajectories amid scholasticide.
I approach these topics with an ongoing reflexivity and awareness of their ethical weight and with care toward the people and places that shape my research. My aim is not to speak for lived experiences, but to think critically alongside them, center them in the process, and to contribute, however modestly, to and engage with scholarly conversations on violence and its impact on everyday survival.
Funding
Research career
My academic trajectory has gradually taken shape around questions of culture, gender, daily life under colonial rule, and human rights. I completed a Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature at the Islamic University of Gaza in May 2020. During my undergraduate studies, my research focused on the ideological dimensions of education, with particular attention to how gender is represented in English poetry textbooks used across universities in Gaza. This work honed my critical and linguistic capacities, informing my engagement with questions of identity, power, and representation under conditions of colonial constraint.
After completing my bachelor’s degree, I was fortunate to receive support through competitive academic funding. In April 2021, I was awarded a scholarship from the Norwegian Partnership Programme for Global Academic Cooperation (NORPART) to pursue a Master of Science in Human Rights and Multiculturalism at the University of South-Eastern Norway, graduating in June 2023. This period marked a shift toward the social sciences and allowed me to expand my interest in the relationship between gender and dignity. My master’s thesis examined masculinities and human dignity (karāmah) in the Gaza Strip, focusing on how the structural realities of blockade and recurring military violence reshape gendered expectations. In particular, I explored how concepts such as “protector” and “breadwinner” are renegotiated when the material conditions that sustain these roles are systematically undermined.
In October 2022, I received a grant from the Fritt Ord Foundation in collaboration with the University of South-Eastern Norway, which supported my research on the entanglement of freedom of expression and human rights. These opportunities enabled me to continue my work with care and responsibility, particularly in navigating the ethical and political challenges involved in researching contexts shaped by ongoing crisis.
In late 2023, I joined Tampere University as a doctoral researcher, part of an ERC project 'Dwelling with Crisis: Home at Spaces of Chronic Violence' (HOMCRI), under Mikko Joronen's supervision, working on everyday life and dwelling practices in Gaza under genocidal violence.