Palestine Studies at University of Toronto
Throughout the fall term, Dr. Aziza Chaouni and Dr. Jens Hanssen — co-founder of the Hearing Palestine Initiative — held a series of guest lectures for their co-taught course, ARC465F: Reimagining Palestinian Modern Architectural Heritage. Speakers including Nadi Abusaada, Shatha Safi, Khaldun Bishara, Dima Yaser, Susanne Bosch, as well as Elias and Youssef Anastas presented on their research and work in rehabilitating, adapting and reimagining Palestinian built heritage.
Monday, May 9 2022, 6:30PM – 8:30PM.
Event Overview:
Systemic racism against Palestinians has appeared in several recent events at the University of Toronto and the TDSB, as well as other Canadian educational institutions. In its widely-anticipated report, the Arab Canadians Lawyers Association (ACLA) seeks to describe anti-Palestinian racism and launch a wider discussion about how to combat it. This webinar features Dania Majid, the chief author of the ACLA report, and responses from Abigail Bakan and Azeezah Kanji.
Thursday, February 3 2022, 6:00PM – 8:00PM.
Event Overview:
Lina Lashin, former Hearing Palestine Programming Coordinator, moderated a panel with Sabrine Azraq, founder of Buycott Palestine — an intiative in pursuit of supporting Palestinian businesses and organizations — and Shatha AbuAhmad — an active community organizer for Palestinian liberation. They discussed the erasure of the study of Palestine in institutions of higher education, including the University of Toronto, which contributes to Palestinian students and many other Middle Eastern backgrounds often feeling invisible, erased and/or unsafe on campus.
Title: The Study of Palestine from “The Undercommons”: Anti-colonial Epistemologies, Method, and Praxis
Speaker: Chandni Desi, Assistant Professor at the Centre for Critical Studies of Equity and Solidarity at the University of Toronto
Date: November 25, 2021
Time: 12:00pm to 1:30pm EST
Description:
Dr. Desai joins us for a talk that focuses on the challenges and contradictions of preserving Palestine, from occupied Palestine to campuses in Canada.
The talk will examine the systematic attempts at dislocating, displacing, and erasing Palestinian archives, by the Israeli state and other actors that have contributed to curricular erasures. The talk will also speak to the epistemic challenges of studying Palestine from “the undercommons”, a space of epistemic resistance to settler colonial erasure.
Dr. Chandni Desai
Chandni Desai is an Assistant Professor in the Critical Studies of Equity and Solidarity at UofT. Her areas of interest and expertise include comparative settler colonialism, capitalist imperialism, Middle East politics, state violence, cultural resistance, political economy, anti-racism, feminism, youth activism, decolonization and abolition. Dr. Desai is working on her first book Revolutionary Circuits of Liberation: The Radical Tradition of Palestinian Resistance Culture and Internationalism. In it she excavates the history of the radical tradition of Palestinian resistance culture, specifically the cultural institutions, archives and radical arts practices established by Palestinian revolutionaries. She maps the circulation of resistance culture across geographies in the 20th and 21st century, the legacy of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist cultural production, and praxis against settler colonial dispossession, imperialism, warfare and genocide, past and present.
Desai is also the host of the Liberation Pedagogy Podcast, a co-investigator on a SSHRC insight development grant, a collaborator on the SSHRC funded Youth, War, Migration Project and has co-taught an ELL course on settler colonialism, displacement and settlement to refugees from the Middle East and Africa. I know I speak for many students when I say that we are very fortunate to have her as an academic, leader, and instructor at the University of Toronto.
Co-Sponsors
Title: Spatial Encounters: Aerial Imagery, Mapping & Palestine’s Colonial Landscape
Speaker: Nadi Abusaada, PhD candidate at Cambridge University
Date: October 21, 2021
Time: 11:30am to 1:00pm EDT
Nadi Abusaada (Ph.D. cand., Cambridge University) will be speaking about his times as a UofT undergraduate student from 2012-2016 as well as his doctoral research on how colonial perspectives of Palestine have been shaped by technologies of flight and how aerial photography has contributed to the erasure of the Palestinian people and their material environments.
Nadi Abusaada
Nadi is currently a joint fellow at the Palestinian American Research Centre and the Palestinian Museum. His research has been featured in The Architectural Review, the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and the Jerusalem Quarterly among other places. In 2019 he won the Ibrahim Dakkak Annual Award for Outstanding Research on Jerusalem from the Institute for Palestine Studies. He is co-founder of Arab Urbanism Magazine and a regular contributor to Palestine Square.