Event | Mapping Erasure – Lecture & Masterclass
Event | Mapping Erasure – Lecture & Masterclass
Dates: 6-7 February 2025
Location: SPUI25 (Feb. 6) & Singel University Library, University of Amsterdam (Feb. 7)
Organizers: Eleri Connick, Yolande Jansen,
Registration lecture: SPUI25 Website
Registration masterclass: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdbSdUKsTQeBAllVM047NZtkWclp7YcxwOwNk5VkWnswjRBxQ/viewform
Contact: e.connick@uva.nl
Registration deadline: 17 January 2025
Credits: 1 ECTS
Mapping Erasure – Lecture
Date: 6 February 2025
Location: SPUI25, Amsterdam
Starting at al ‘Arub refugee camp in the West Bank and moving between the territories Israel occupied in 1948 and in 1967 as well as the Palestinian refugee camps, we see a geography unfold which remains prone to rupture and transformation. Dr Hashem Abushama’s talk will address the significance of understanding the multiple Palestinian geographies and how it is a map without guarantees: where there is neither a guarantee that settler colonialism’s intent to eliminate the Palestinians will succeed, nor a guarantee that Palestinians will take up a particular form of resistance. This already constitutes a socio-spatial practice that pays attention to rehearsals of Palestinian return in a context of genocidal violence and dispossession.
But the production and erasure of maps are part of the very same systems of power and exploitation. So why do alternative maps or counter maps matter? Dr Abushama proposes that we read and practice counter-maps that refute linear and colonial understandings space and time. As such, we will explore the ways in which counter-mapping can bring into focus the contingent and differentiated nature of settler colonial dispossession and fragmentation, as well as the embodied, spatial practices and processes of Palestinian return and freedom.
About the Speakers
Dr Hashem Abushama is an Associate Professor in Human Geography and Tutorial Fellow at St Peter’s College. He holds a DPhil in Human Geography and an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Peace and Global Studies from Earlham College in the United States. He is also a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin as well as a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies. He has authored several academic and journalistic articles on dispossession, arts, urbanization, the archives, and postcolonial Marxism.
Chiara De Cesari is Professor of Heritage and Memory and Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Trained in socio-cultural anthropology (Ph.D. Stanford 2009), Chiara is an internationally significant voice in debates over the geopolitical trajectories of contemporary culture. Her wide-ranging research explores how institutional manifestations of memory, heritage, art, and cultural politics are shifting under conditions of contemporary globalization and ongoing transformations of the nation-state. In particular, it concerns the ways in which colonial legacies live on today, especially in museums. Against that backdrop, Chiara’s work shows how countercultures, arts practices, and decolonial struggles can drive change within public institutions and cultural discourses around heritage and identity more generally.
Annelys de Vet (1974, NL, she/her) is a Belgium-based designer, researcher, and educator with a practice for long-term, participative design projects that actively engage in social and political struggles. De Vet initiated the publishing initiative ‘Subjective Editions,’ which provides publications mapping countries from the inside out, offering a human perspective. De Vet established the temporary master’s program ‘Disarming Design’ (2019–2022) at the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam, dedicated to design practices in situations of oppression at the intersection of design, crafts, politics, pedagogy, community, and activism.
Eleri Connick (moderator) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Amsterdam’s School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. She was the PhD Fellow at Darat al Funun (Amman) February 2023 – July 2023. Her doctoral project titled: “The Materiality of Exile in Jordan: The Palestinian House”, proposes a radical conceptualisation of home and all that it can provoke to ground her work both conceptually and methodologically.
Dispossession and the Creation of the Counter-Map in the Levant – Masterclass
Date: 7 February 2025
Time: 10:00-14:00 (lunch following masterclass)
Location: OMHP (Oudemanhuispoort UvA), room C.2.17.