Geographies of Life and Belonging in Palestine: the Practices of Retrieving the Incarcerated Dead

This research project explores the actions and experiences of Palestinians contesting a politics of death and captivity. Since 1967, Israel has withheld and interred Palestinian dead bodies in mass unmarked graves in the covert yet infamous 'cemeteries of numbers'. This phenomenon of incarcerating the dead is part of a long trajectory of control and violence by the Israeli settler state. Within this, however, Palestinians carve out geographies of life and belonging through their practices of memorialising and retrieving the dead. Applying an ethnographic multi-method strategy and engaging with grassroots community groups, legal and advocacy organisations and Palestinian state actors, this project will build a comprehensive and nuanced account of these contestations to the politics of death. The overall aim of the project is to focus on Palestinian voices, actions and claims which are routinely obscured and understudied within the vast and intimate violence of occupation.

Opening up debates on the meaning, treatment and impact of indigenous dead bodies is increasingly relevant for fostering recognition of the deep-rooted, intimate and vast violence of settler colonialism more broadly. As such, this project will produce two creative outputs in the form of a non-academic booklet (in Arabic and English) and small-scale exhibition in Scotland and Palestine, reaching public audiences and engaging with wider debates. This is an important and timely study tracing the everyday geographies of life and belonging cultivated by indigenous communities within contexts of political violence.