archives & heritage for Palestine
archives & heritage for Palestine
a series co-hosted by Dr. Jamila Ghaddar & Tam Rayan
الأرشيف والتراث لفلسطين
سلسلة ندوات من تقديم الدكتورة جميلة غدار وتام ريان
Embedded Files
The Archives & Heritage for Palestine series is a joint initiative of the Middle East Librarians Association (Archives & Heritage for Palestine Advocacy Sub-Group), the Archives & Digital Media Lab; and sponsored by the Lebanese Library Association, CUNY’s Archival Technologies Lab, Library Freedom, we here, Interference Archive, and up//root.
The series responds to the urgent need to act in solidarity with Palestinian colleagues and institutions in Palestine and the Shetat (Diaspora) to safeguard the heritage, history, and memory of the Palestinian people under settler colonialism and genocide. Through education and advocacy, the series works to surface, connect, amplify, and promote the efforts already underway by Palestinians and supporters in Palestine and around the world in the archives and heritage sectors.
upcoming events الندوات القادمة
info@archiveslab.org | @archivesdigilab | @MELALibs | @publishers4palestine | @archivesdigitalmedialab| @pubforpalestine | @jjghaddar
“We are the living archives that do not die, we are the ones who made our history with our blood, and it is time for us to document our past and present ourselves and preserve our collective national memory.” - Dr. Faiha Abdulhadi in World Archives Day: We Are the Archives (October 20, 2024)
On August 21, the 10th Archives & Heritage for Palestine seminar brings together radical Palestinian, Lebanese and Iraqi feminists and scholars, Dr. Faiha Abdulhadi and Dr. Manal Hamzeh in conversation with Dr. Mariam Karim and co-hosts Dr. Jamila Ghaddar and Tam Rayan on oral history, resistant memory and decolonial knowledge co-creation. Centered on Arab feminist resistant histories, the seminar explores Dr. Abdulhadi’s and Dr. Hamzeh’s liberatory research into Palestinian and Arab practices of bearing witness and collective memory work in defiance of Zionist erasure and Western colonial epistemic violence in and through the archive and academy. Rooted in Arabiyya epistemologies, this seminar situates haki and cultural heritage preservation in relation to land, place, and the body, as Dr. Hamzeh explores in her work on Arab Feminist Testimonies (2020, 2025). Through their body of writing and practice, Abdulhadi and Hamzeh have courageously redefined Arabyya methodologies through knowledge co-creation, grounded in Palestinian and Arab narratives across the past, present and future. Join us as we learn and work together toward decolonial horizons and liberatory futures.
The Archives & Heritage for Palestine series is a joint initiative of the Middle East Librarians Association, Publishers for Palestine, Archives & Digital Media Lab, and Fighting Erasure: Digitizing Gaza’s Genocide and the War on Lebanon project; and sponsored by the Lebanese Library Association, CUNY’s Archival Technologies Lab, Library Freedom, we here, Interference Archive, and up//root.
Donate to the Fighting Erasure project here, which funds the Archives & Heritage for Palestine series. Your donations are crucial for us to be able to host these events and related activities. Tax receipts available through the American University of Beirut.
Dr. Faiha Abdulhadi, PhD, is a writer, poet, research consultant, community activist, and lecturer, in addition to a long life experience in various aspects of research, oral history, gender, and other issues of human interest. She is the founder and the Director General of Al Rowat for Studies and Research, Al Rowat (Narrators) seeks to accomplish a major goal: rewriting social history by focusing on the stories of marginalized groups and documenting stories of people who witnessed relevant historic events. She is a member of the “Palestinian National Council”, and the “Palestinian Central Council”. She is the chairwoman of the board of trustees of “The Palestinian Center for Policy Research and Strategic Studies” (Masarat). She has published 15 books in addition to various studies and articles in literature, poetry, oral history, women studies and politics.
Dr. Manal Hamzeh is a full professor and co-founder of the Department of Borderlands and Ethnic Studies (BEST) at New Mexico State University (NMSU) (2022—). She is the director of the BEST Research Center, the founder of BEST’s decolonial research minor (2024), and the lead faculty teaching two Palestine Studies courses. She is the sole author of Women Resisting Sexual Violence and the Egyptian Revolution: Arab Feminist Testimonies (2020) and the co-researcher/co-editor/co-producer of Three Women of Tahrir: Stories from the Egyptian Revolution, a documentary/non-fiction graphic book (2020). She is the researcher/scholar of Shahadat, a play script authored by Fouad Taymour (2024). She is the sole author of Pedagogies of DeVeiling: Muslim Girls and the Hijab Discourse (2012) and the co-author of The Four Hijab (2016), an animation film. She is also author and co-author of over 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in journals like International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Ethnicity & Education, Journal of Anthropology of the Middle East, Cairo Papers in Social Science: Oral History in Times of Change,35(1), 124-131; Journal of Women’s Studies International Forum, Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal; The Journal of Curriculum Inquiry and the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy.
Dr. Mariam Karim is a Lebanese-Iraqi Global Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar (#IAS_NUQ) and the founder of the digital humanities project, Nasawiyyah: Arab Media History. She is a member of the Steering Council of the Archives & Digital Media Lab where she also serves as a Feminist Histories & Archival Fellow. Karim completed her PhD at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information (iSchool) and the Women and Gender Studies Institute (WGSI). She served as an inaugural graduate fellow at the University of Toronto's Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI) and was the recipient of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral award. Her research agenda explores Arab Feminist Media from the 20th century. To do this, she follows Arab women’s expansive mass-media practices, contributions, and ideas from the 20th century as central points of reference. @nasawiyyah
Dr. Jamila Ghaddar is a Lebanese feminist, archivist, historian, and educator. She is Assistant Professor in Archival Information & Digital Humanities at the Media Studies Department at the University of Amsterdam, and Founding Director of the Archives & Digital Media Lab (ADML). She is Chair of the Middle East Librarians Association’s Archives & Records Management Training & Advocacy Group; a member of the Association of Canadian Archivists’ Indigenous Matters Committee; co-convenor of Documentary Nakba: A Reading Group for Archival Liberation in & beyond Palestine; and co-host of Archives & Heritage in Palestine. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow working with Raymond Frogner at the National Center for Truth & Reconciliation and Dr. Greg Bak at the History Dept. at the University of Manitoba. Her publications appear in Archival Science; Library Quarterly; Archivaria; Displaced Archival Heritage (2023, Routledge); Research Methods: Diversifying and Decolonizing Research (2024, SAGE); Briarpatch; Al-Akhbar. Ghaddar has led and collaborated on archival initiatives and information projects in sites around the world, including at AUB’s Jafet Library archiving the personal papers of the Arab intellectual who coined the term “Nakba”, Dr. Constantine Zurayk; and at the Centre of Memory in Johannesburg preserving the papers of the antiapartheid hero, Nelson Mandela.
Tamara Rayan is a PhD candidate in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, specializing in Archives and Digital Curation. She received her MI in Information Studies and MA in Ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto. Her research is focused on deconstructing how colonialism operates through archival infrastructures as well as how to build transformative archival representations of those in diaspora. Specifically, she is interested in how to better serve and represent the recordkeeping needs of Palestinians with unique intergenerational traumas, impacted by forced migration, displacement, and exile. She is an Anti-Racist Digital Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, a former steering committee member of the SAA Archivists and Archives of Color section, and a former ARL/SAA Mosaic Fellow. Her research has been published in Across the Disciplines and Archival Science. https://www.tamrayan.com/
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past events الندوات السابقة
Dr. Salman Abu Sitta in conversation with Ghada Dimashq
We were honored to host renowned scholar and historian, Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, Founder and President of the Palestine Land Studies Center (PLSC) at the American University of Beirut, in conversation with Ghada Dimashk, PLSC librarian and archivist, for the first installment of Archives & Heritage for Palestine. “Against Genocide: Mapping the Future of Palestine, One Archive at a Time,” in Public Source includes a transcript of the main presentation; edited. More Details
susan abulhawa
susan abulhawa, author of the globally beloved novel Mornings in Jenin, founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, and director of the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, spoke at the second installment of Archives & Heritage for Palestine.
Dr. Rana Barakat
This session of Archives & Heritage for Palestine draws upon Dr. Rana Barakat’s extensive work in writing a historiography of Palestine, which situates the Palestinian narrative outside of colonial frameworks in a celebration of indigenous resistance and nationalism.
Dr. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury
Dr. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury
We are pleased to announce the 4th instalment of Archives & Heritage for Palestine, featuring Dr. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, and hosted by Dr. Jamila Ghaddar and Tam Rayan, in defence of Palestinian life, land, liberation, and return. This session will draw upon Dr. Sabbagh-Khoury’s extensive work in reading against the grain of kibbutzim records to narrate Palestinian history from the fragments found within settler colonial archives.
Dr. Salim Tamari
Dr. Salim Tamari
This session draws upon Dr. Tamari’s research into the archives, biographies, and diaries of Palestinians pre-dating the Nakba, to discuss how Palestinian society was reshaped through Israeli settler colonialism and its manifold, relentless violences. Against the colonial myth of “a land without a people for a people without a land,” Dr. Tamari’s work tracks a continuous line between Palestine’s rich cultural and political landscape during the Ottoman and British Mandate eras to the present.
Dr. Abdul Latif Zaki Abu Hashim
Drawing on Dr. Abu Hashim’s extensive scholarship and archival interventions, this session will highlight the real history of Gaza as a center of learning, culture, and history as captured in its archival heritage. It will also showcase the incredible work that has been done throughout the wars on Gaza to safeguard the rich manuscript culture and archival heritage of the Strip, including over the last month as people began returning and resuming their archival interventions.
Dr. Haidar Eid
As a leading Palestinian scholar at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza, Dr. Eid has been outspoken in advocating for liberation that is uncompromising on the Palestinian right to self-determination, return, and equality. This session draws from Dr. Eid’s recent book, Decolonizing the Palestinian Mind (2025), an urgent and uncompromising call for Palestinian liberation from the river to the sea, grounded in a fiery rejection of Orientalism and normalization, and a profound engagement with the South African experience.
From Lebanon to Palestine: Fighting Erasure, Archiving against Genocide
The event took place on Monday, May 19, 2025, at the Faculty of Information and Documentation at the Lebanese University in Beirut. Throughout the day, members of the Fighting Erasure project team presented projects focused on preserving archival and cultural heritage in Palestine and Lebanon contextualized within the broader framework of Israeli practices that have led to the systematic destruction of human lives and their social and cultural environments.
Dr. Habib Sadek, Maryam Hariri, Amani Rammal & Fatima el-Bazzal in conversation with Shatha Hanayshe
Live from the renowned Beit Beirut Museum & Urban Cultural Center in Lebanon, the ninth installment of the Archives & Heritage for Palestine series marked 19 years since the 2006 Israeli War on Lebanon by bringing together noted Lebanese archivists, cultural stewards and academics. The event took place on July 12, 2025. While the aggressors seek to erase local history in Lebanon, Palestine, and across the region through acts of violence, all of us together—through committed, intentional work—can confront that erasure and breathe life back into what they seek to obliterate. More Details
Dr. Faiha Abdulhadi & Dr. Manal Hamzeh in conversation with Dr. Mariam Karim
Centered on Arab feminist resistant histories, the seminar explores Dr. Abdulhadi’s and Dr. Hamzeh’s liberatory research into Palestinian and Arab practices of bearing witness and collective memory work in defiance of Zionist erasure and Western colonial epistemic violence in and through the archive and academy. Rooted in Arabiyya epistemologies, this seminar situates haki and cultural heritage preservation in relation to land, place, and the body, as Dr. Hamzeh explores in her work on Arab Feminist Testimonies (2020, 2025). Through their body of writing and practice, Abdulhadi and Hamzeh have courageously redefined Arabyya methodologies through knowledge co-creation, grounded in Palestinian and Arab narratives across the past, present and future. Join us as we learn and work together toward decolonial horizons and liberatory futures. More Details
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