With Palestine In Mind : Anti-Colonial and Indigenous Methodologies In Contexts of Dispossession

In Indigenous, anti-colonial, and decolonial traditions, land is not merely territory or a material resource. It is a site of knowledge production, collective memory, political subjectivity, and relational forms of life. Knowledge itself emerges through lived relations to place, community, and environment rather than through abstract universal categories.

Colonial, settler-colonial, and extractive projects have historically targeted both land and knowledge. Dispossession is often accompanied by epistemic violence: the erasure of histories, destruction of archives, restrictions on mobility, attacks on educational institutions, and the disciplining of research practices. Across Palestine, Latin America, Africa, and other contexts marked by colonial domination and extractive governance, struggles over land are inseparable from struggles over knowledge production and circulation.

This panel explores the methodological implications of conducting research where land, memory, and knowledge are under attack. How can researchers develop methodologies that remain accountable to affected communities while confronting displacement, restricted mobility, environmental destruction, and institutional fragility? What methodological innovations emerge from Indigenous, anti-colonial, participatory, feminist, and land-based approaches? How can research move beyond extractive modes of knowledge production and contribute to struggles for justice and self-determination?

We welcome papers on Indigenous, anti-colonial, and decolonial methodologies; land-based research; research under conditions of war, occupation, dispossession, or environmental destruction.

By centering methodology as a site of political and epistemological struggle, the panel seeks to foster dialogue on producing knowledge differently in contexts of colonial violence, dispossession, and resistance.