Holding space open
Wor(l)ding the ruins of Gaza
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20254000 |
|---|---|
| Authors | M Joronen (0000-0002-4051-2348, Tampere University), Khalid Dader (0000-0003-2121-2953, Tampere University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-06-29 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environment and Planning C Politics and Space (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2399-6544 • E-ISSN: 2399-6552 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/23996544261466065 |
| OpenAlex | W7166589581 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
Witnessing the erasure of spaces and landscapes in Gaza reveals as much the ethical and ontological necessity to narrate as it does the limits of writing. In this commentary on Lubna Abu Sitta’s intervention, we grasp this tension by thinking with her how embodied writing can narrate what seems impossible for words to capture. Abu Sitta’s writing in-place and through lived ruination voices affects, attachments, vulnerabilities, losses, and exposures that circumnavigate bodies, while importantly holding space open for memory and life in a way that resist immense spatial erasure. This urges us to think embodied displacement geographically, bringing attention to ways of inhabiting the ruins and destruction with makeshift infrastructures, memories, and narrations of survival. These ways and the losses they carry might not lend themselves easily to academic narration, but they are nevertheless carved into bodies, memories, affects, atmospheres, materialities and landscapes—to spaces and bodies that are worlding the impossible in the ruins of Gaza
Displacement (psychology) · Embodied cognition · GRASP · Materiality (auditing) · Narrative · Space (punctuation) · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration
Writing Shame
Topologies of scholasticide in Gaza
Writing against erasure
The slow violence of Israeli settler-colonialism and the political ecology of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank
Uncanny returns in settler colonial state
Colonialism and Apartheid Against Fragmented Palestinians
The banality of scholasticide
The geopolitics of ‘Enclavisation’and the demise of a two-stateSolution to the Israeli – Palestinian conflict
Fitful Infrastructures
Gaza
Unspectacular spaces of slow wounding in Palestine
The Politics of Acquiring the Colonizer’s Language in the Colonial Academy
This Is What Ecocide Looks Like
Turning Palestine into a Terra Nullius
Beyond Apartheid Israel
Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims
| Highly cited | No |
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