Other Ways of Seeing and Knowing Ecologies
Muna Dajani

This talk embarks on a journey throughout geographic locations in the Jordan River Basin and aim to contextualise and problematise ways of knowing, accessing, and sharing natural resources in Bilad al Sham under conditions of settler colonialism and legacies of colonial rule. It centres the narrative on local indigenous communities and their lived experiences and active memories of colonial transformations of their landscapes and ecosystems, paying particular attention to the small, mundane, and subtle acts of everyday life. Taking into account the ongoing processes of displacement and uprooting, intensified by capitalist extractive logic and neoliberal agendas of nation-states, it hopes to engage with theoretical and grounded attempts of decolonising not only our ecologies but also our worldviews and our positionality in this complex and hyper-connected world.

Dr. Muna Dajani holds a PhD in Geography and Environment from the London School of Economics (LSE). Her research examines water struggles in agricultural communities and the linkages with politics of belonging and recognition. She has contributed to numerous studies on the hydropolitics of the Jordan and Yarmouk River Basins, in addition to her interest in topics related to water, energy, and climate justice. She is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Lancaster Environment Centre as part of the Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability (T2GS) project which comparatively explores promising grassroots initiatives of groundwater governance around the world. She is also a Research Officer at the Middle East Centre at LSE, where she is leading a collaboration project with Birzeit University on Mapping Memories of Resistance in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. She is a policy member at Al-Shabaka, The Palestinian Policy Network.