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Opacity in Gaza: Intimate Relations as Resistance

Speaker
Hadeel Assali
Date
Mon February 23rd 2026, 3:30 - 5:00pm
Location
Building 50, Room 51A
**This event is open to those of the Stanford community ONLY**
Hadeel Assali

❗️There will also be lunch with the speaker on the same day prior to the colloquium @12:30pm in room 51A❗️

This talk reflects on the long relationship between the people of southern Palestine (Gaza) and the land itself. Gaza’s clay-rich soils have enabled resistance to colonial attempts at annihilation through many forms: the construction of clay ovens when fuel was cut, the making of wares for displaced people who left everything behind, and, of course, the tunnels. However, Palestinians have been colluding with the earth for survival and resistance in a multitude of ways for decades, and these ‘collusions’--or relations–are unintelligible to colonial/Western modes of grasping the land. One of these modes is the discipline of geology, one of many disciplines that emerged from the British imperial expansion and still retains the same paradigms that inform all the geo/climate sciences and that lack the intimacy of local, indigenous knowledge and relations.