Dr Hashem Abushama

Hashem Abushama is a Departmental Lecturer and Career Development Fellow at St John's College and the School of Geography and the Environment (SoGE) at the University of Oxford. He is a human geographer with interests in urban studies, cultural studies, critical development studies, and postcolonial geographies. He holds a DPhil in Human Geography from the School of Geography and the Environment and an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford, and a BA in Peace and Global Studies from Earlham College in the United States. His PhD dissertation won the runner up for the Leigh Douglas Memorial Award for the Best Dissertation in British Middle East Studies. His writings have appeared in Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, the Jerusalem Quarterly, Jadaliyya, and Palestine Square.

In his forthcoming monograph Cities and the Settler Colony: Accumulation, Dispossession, and Arts, Abushama examines Palestinian cultural productions in Haifa and Ramallah. The monograph takes the cities as two connected yet distinctly different sites in the production of global capitalism and settler colonialism. It looks at everyday processes of cultural production (theatre, music, and visual arts) and their intertwinement with processes of market reconfiguration, gentrification, and racialization following the neoliberalisation of Israel in 1985. By weaving together in-depth interviews, counter-mapping, visual analysis, and archival research, the monograph traces processes of socio-spatial formation to offer a materialist understanding of cultural productions that shows how neoliberal capitalism adapts itself to colonial dispossession and racialization. The monograph takes countermaps, produced by Palestinian architect and musician Haya Zaatry, as a vantage point into analysing the layering of dispossession within Palestinian cities. By bridging postcolonial and post-Marxist geographies, the research makes key contributions to how we understand the contradictory workings of capitalism and Israeli settler colonialism in historic Palestine and beyond, and how people make sense of their complex social realities.