Sessions at AAG 2025 that share principles and themes with Geographers for Justice in Palestine’s organizing work can be found below.
Do you have a paper or session that concerns Palestine? Let us know.
Resistance, Communities, and Solidarities
Building Better Worlds 1
- Date: 3/24/2025
- Time: 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM
- Location: 354, Level 3, Huntington Place
Drawing on and thinking with Indigenous geographies (Simpson 2014), Latine geographies (Caretta and Pepa 2023); Black feminist thought (Malaklou 2018; Olufemi 2021), abolition studies (Burns et al 2020; Moldonado and Meiners 2022), care ethics (Woodlly et al 2021), and political ecology (Barra 2024), these sessions ask how we continue to imagine, live in, and actively build otherwise worlds.
Racial Regimes of Property, Policing, and Banishment II
- Date: 3/24/2025
- Time: 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM
- Location: 310A, Level 3, Huntington Place
In recent years, processes of geographical displacement, dispossession, and banishment have been re-examined through the lens of property as a “racial regime” (Bhandar 2018; Safransky 2023). This work builds on decades of critical scholarship on property in geography and beyond (Blomley 1998; Tully 1993; Hunt 2014) by examining how discourses of property are entwined with discourses about race in a variety of contexts. In the context of settler colonies, this work shows how “justifications for property ownership remain bound to a concept of the human that is thoroughly racial in its makeup” (Bhandar 2018: 4). It also shows how struggles over displacement, dispossession, and banishment are simultaneously “struggles over notions of race, property, and citizenship that undergird liberal democracies” (Safransky 2016: 3; also McElroy 2020). Within this literature, a few scholars have examined how policing is related to racial regimes of property (see Bonds 2018), but more work is needed to understand how property and policing are co-constituted in/as racial regimes.This session explores this broad theme through papers that explore, among other things, the role of Black artists in advancing alternative spatial imaginaries, historic and contemporary surveillance technologies, the links between urban planning and community policing, and the ways postcolonial state regulation and nonregulation structures abolitionist futures.
Postcolonial Geographies
Racial Banishment
- Date: 3/25/2025
- Time: 10:10 AM - 11:30 AM
- Location: 250A, Level 2, Huntington Place
How do we make sense of forms of dispossession that are not easily interpreted by the familiar vocabularies of displacement? How do we understand dispossession in relation to personhood and not just property? We come together in this session to take up some of these questions through the study of various forms of racial banishment, including geographies of urbicide, domicide, containment, peripheralization. With careful recognition of the global and transnational histories of race, we rely on Black geographies and postcolonial critique for an extended understanding of the color-lines that structure the world and world-making projects such as development. To this end, we analyze racial banishment in relation not only to social death but also development logics such as resettlement and rehabilitation. Conceptualized during the unrelenting Israeli genocide of Palestinians, we are especially attentive to colonial-racial violence, from Gaza to India to the Florida suburbs to Los Angeles to Brazil’s Northeast. Thinking from Gaza also instructs us in the imperative to learn from, and accompany, banished subjects who not only survive but also live, insisting upon rebellion, refusal, and return.
Historical Materialism and the Geography of our Changing World
- Date: 3/25/2025
- Time: 10:10 AM - 11:30 AM
- Location: 332, Level 3, Huntington Place
This paper secession brings together theoretical and empirical research across scales that examine the dialectical unravelling of social process. These papers present a kaleidoscope of geographical phenomena that range from financial flows that impact neoliberal landscape, to exercise of imperial power that has decimated Gaza; and from fetishism of commodity, to fetishism of carbon sequestration and smart cities. These papers will draw upon and contribute to the numerous traditions within radical geography.
Geopolitical Tension around the Holy Land
Land Cover/Land Use Change
- Date: 3/25/2025
- Time: 4:10 PM - 5:30 PM
- Location: 336, Level 3, Huntington Place
In the aftermath of climate change and geopolitical conflict in the Middle East, it has become more important than ever to examine the physical and social push and pull factors that caused migration, adaptation, and technological innovations in and around the Holy Land. The goal of this session is to discuss and map how the physical characteristics of the Holy Land forced technological, economic, and strategic innovations in transporting humans, animals, goods and services in and out of the Holy Land. Neighboring empires like Assyria had to confront environmental constraints like climate, water, and land while on a quest to conquer the Holy Land. Seasonal and episodic climate events forced Israel and Judah’s rival empires to devise select temporal patterns to mobilize militaries to avoid seasonal weather patterns like droughts, monsoons, etc. Hydrogeomorphological elements like river currents and bathymetry influenced nautical routes of prophets and apostles on theological missions. Knowledge of topography and landforms were vital in understanding how variations in elevation and terrain impacted the location and naming of holy sites like mountain tops. Transportation through valleys and around mountains improved the efficiency of shipping and the supply chain. Land cover directly influenced migration, settlement patterns, and the survival/morbidity of immigrants and emigrants like the Israelites in the deserts of Egypt.
Geographies of Genocide
- Date: 3/25/2025
- Time: 4:10 PM - 5:30 PM
- Location: 311A, Level 3, Huntington Place
This panel invites renewed engagement with the spatial politics of genocide. Scholars have recently made a number of forays into the mainstream press to grapple with a perennial question: which violence constitutes genocide, and under what circumstances? (Feldman 2023, Kinstler, 2024). “Genocide”, as these theorists note, is hardly a neutral description of mass violence, but one mediated through highly particular legal parameters. Geographers, likewise, argue that the spatial dimensions of mass atrocity play an integral role in debates about when–or even if–mass violence assumes the legal mantle of genocide (Oglesby and Ross, 2009; Carmalt 2019). As debates about what counts as “genocide” continue to unfold, geographic scholarship is poised to make unique contributions. In that spirit, this proposed AAG ‘25 paper session welcomes scholarship on “genocide” that broaches the complex intertwining of the term’s legal and spatial dimensions. We look forward to papers focusing on empirical cases of mass atrocity in the their legal complexity, the spatio-legal construction of tribunals, as well as any other venue in which the intertwined legal are spatial politics of genocide are sensitively addressed.
Solidarity, in Translation
- Date: 3/26/2025
- Time: 12:50 PM - 2:10 PM
- Location: 354, Level 3, Huntington Place
This session seeks to connect scholars who are thinking about the politics of solidarity across languages. What does it mean to write a multilingual geography within and beyond sites that geographers write as “Anglophone,” like the US, Australia and the UK? What does it mean to talk, think and write in radical traditions that span diasporas? How does the political intervention of a project change when it is translated into English? What doesn’t get translated from English, and how does this reveal the geopolitics of unequal power relations in research, migration regimes, and international justice processes? What work do interpretation and translation do for languages and artwork that privilege a sonic form and then are read as a written text? How might translation open up new possibilities for worldmaking and solidarity? We welcome engagements that think through the work of written translation and/or spoken interpretation as a political act that can engender and/or reveal solidarities in moments of crisis. We are particularly interested in scholars whose writing, thinking and publishing span multiple languages.
Landback, Abolition, and the University I
- Date: 3/26/2025
- Time: 2:30 PM - 3:50 PM
- Location: 411A, Level 4, Huntington Place
What does landback mean at a university? How do we work for abolition when we study and work at institutions built by the labor of people who were enslaved? The Landback Abolition Project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has brought together students, faculty, and staff to grapple with what landback and abolition, repair, rematriation, and reparations might mean in the context of this university. In the archives, and traversing campus, we have taken up the principles of land education to collectively study our institution’s historic and present relationship to Indigenous dispossession, Black enslavement, and their afterlives. Over the last decade we have witnessed how these histories continue to structure our present through this institution’s responses (or lack thereof) to the demands of Black and Native students. In the past year, these issues have only become more pressing as our campuses have been transformed in response to students, staff, and faculty standing in solidarity with Palestine—adding to the history of universities as sites of political action and conservative re-entrenchment. We have been thinking about these issues through the lenses of land-as-pedagogy (Simpson 2014; Goeman 2015; McCoy, Tuck, and McKenzie 2016; Tuck et al. 2013) and racial capitalism (Lowe 2015; Robinson 1983; Johnson and Lubin 2017), together with other Black, Indigenous, and anticolonial scholarship, as well as critical scholarship on universities (Lee and Ahtone 2020; Ambo and Rocha Beardall 2023; Brayboy and Tachine 2021; Wilder 2013; Baldwin 2021; Daigle 2019; Singh and Vora 2023). As a practice, we have been engaging with community conversations, and reorganizing our teaching to begin from our land and make space for students to research the university itself.
Landback, Abolition, and the University II
- Date: 3/26/2025
- Time: 4:10 PM - 5:30 PM
- Location: 411A, Level 4, Huntington Place
What does landback mean at a university? How do we work for abolition when we study and work at institutions built by the labor of people who were enslaved? The Landback Abolition Project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has brought together students, faculty, and staff to grapple with what landback and abolition, repair, rematriation, and reparations might mean in the context of this university. In the archives, and traversing campus, we have taken up the principles of land education to collectively study our institution’s historic and present relationship to Indigenous dispossession, Black enslavement, and their afterlives. Over the last decade we have witnessed how these histories continue to structure our present through this institution’s responses (or lack thereof) to the demands of Black and Native students. In the past year, these issues have only become more pressing as our campuses have been transformed in response to students, staff, and faculty standing in solidarity with Palestine—adding to the history of universities as sites of political action and conservative re-entrenchment. We have been thinking about these issues through the lenses of land-as-pedagogy (Simpson 2014; Goeman 2015; McCoy, Tuck, and McKenzie 2016; Tuck et al. 2013) and racial capitalism (Lowe 2015; Robinson 1983; Johnson and Lubin 2017), together with other Black, Indigenous, and anticolonial scholarship, as well as critical scholarship on universities (Lee and Ahtone 2020; Ambo and Rocha Beardall 2023; Brayboy and Tachine 2021; Wilder 2013; Baldwin 2021; Daigle 2019; Singh and Vora 2023). As a practice, we have been engaging with community conversations, and reorganizing our teaching to begin from our land and make space for students to research the university itself. We welcome you into this conversation – how are you taking up these questions at your universities? How do you avoid “decolonization as metaphor” (Tuck and Yang 2012)? How do you sustain this work during a period of conservative re-entrenchment, Diversity and Inclusion bans, and the ongoing backlash against critical engagement with history? In this session, we hope to build on conversations from prior AAG conferences to build a community of scholars working toward our long-term goals of sovereignty and liberation. If you are engaging in this kind of work at your university, please join us!
Geographies of Colonial debris in Palestine I
- Date: 3/27/2025
- Time: 12:50 PM - 2:10 PM
- Location: 321, Level 3, Huntington Place
At the time of intensified colonial and imperial ruination of Palestine, we invite geographers to submit proposals critically examining the ongoing destruction of Palestinian spaces, lands, and landscapes—including livelihoods, environments, infrastructures, milieus, volumes and spheres of living—and the various aims think with, through, and (away) from them. We welcome various works related to different entanglements entrenching and sustaining, but also in friction with and resurrecting from Israel’s settler colonial project of erasing Palestine. We are particularly interested in explorations that start from the ruins of Palestinian landscapes: conditions of life and death, regimes of (im)mobility, environmental reconfigurations, material and affective atmospheres, infrastructural (im)possibilities, and technologies of elimination and life-making. Accordingly, topics could include (but are not limited to): Palestinian everyday struggles against intensified violence, homelessness, famine, and infrastructural collapse; the short- and long-term effects of mass bombardment, destruction, and intoxication of the soil, land, water and air; the global regimes and circulations that sustain Israel’s genocidal actions and those who struggle to halt and overcome them. We also welcome contributions that address the question how we, as geographers, respond to Israel’s brutal war on Palestine and the region.
Geographies of Colonial debris in Palestine II
- Date: 3/27/2025
- Time: 2:30 PM - 3:50 PM
- Location: 321, Level 3, Huntington Place
At the time of intensified colonial and imperial ruination of Palestine, we invite geographers to submit proposals critically examining the ongoing destruction of Palestinian spaces, lands, and landscapes—including livelihoods, environments, infrastructures, milieus, volumes and spheres of living—and the various aims think with, through, and (away) from them. We welcome various works related to different entanglements entrenching and sustaining, but also in friction with and resurrecting from Israel’s settler colonial project of erasing Palestine. We are particularly interested in explorations that start from the ruins of Palestinian landscapes: conditions of life and death, regimes of (im)mobility, environmental reconfigurations, material and affective atmospheres, infrastructural (im)possibilities, and technologies of elimination and life-making. Accordingly, topics could include (but are not limited to): Palestinian everyday struggles against intensified violence, homelessness, famine, and infrastructural collapse; the short- and long-term effects of mass bombardment, destruction, and intoxication of the soil, land, water and air; the global regimes and circulations that sustain Israel’s genocidal actions and those who struggle to halt and overcome them. We also welcome contributions that address the question how we, as geographers, respond to Israel’s brutal war on Palestine and the region.
Peripheralization in Excentric Territories
Extended Urbanization 1
- Date: 3/27/2025
- Time: 12:50 PM - 2:10 PM
- Location: 250C, Level 2, Huntington Place
This session brings together contributions that investigate such processes in different scales and geographies, discussing their socioeconomic and ecological implications, as well as the emancipatory potential in ex-centric territories in the exceptional times we are facing today. Finally, the issue calls for challenging and renewing extant methodologies and forms of theory building, and encourages decentered perspectives on the urban.
Palestinian Futures
Contemporary Issues in the Levant
- Date: 3/28/2025
- Time: 4:10 PM - 5:30 PM
- Location: 412B, Level 4, Huntington Place
Amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the increased dispossession and violence in the West Bank since October 7, 2023, this session’s theme, Palestinian Futures, invites conversation about Palestinian futures forged and envisioned that disrupt settler imaginaries of and quests for the future. Therefore, we aim to create a space for scholars to critically analyze the intersecting forces shaping the future of Palestine and the wider Levant, including those arising from settler colonialism, international displacement, and critical health and food insecurity to name a few.
New Directions in Gramscian Studies I
- Date: 3/28/2025
- Time: 10:10 AM - 11:30 AM
- Location: 420A, Level 4, Huntington Place
These panels will consider new directions in Gramscian studies. Ten years after the publication of Gramsci Space, Nature, Politics, the purpose of this panel series is to nourish Gramscian strands of research in and beyond geography, also by highlighting the work of new generations of scholars and intellectuals. Panelists will address the following themes, among others: conjunctural analysis, subaltern groups and classes, (post-)colonial and imperial questions, nature and climate change, anti-fascism and the challenge of the far right. We consider these themes to be closely inter-related. For example, they each provide an opening for engaged understandings of conjunctural analysis as a method of political work for confronting the present.
Author Meets Critics
Rhys Machold's Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel
- Date: 3/25/2025
- Time: 2:30 PM - 3:50 PM
- Location: 250B, Level 2, Huntington Place
Critics and Rhys Machold meet to discuss his newly published Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford University Press, 2024)
Decolonial Methodologies from Palestine to the Americas
- Date: 3/25/2025
- Time: 8:30 AM - 9:50 AM
- Location: 330B, Level 3, Huntington Place
This session discusses in depth a wide range of indigenous decolonial methods in political ecology and geography. It capitalizes upon the need for decolonial theories and praxis especially in light of the ongoing genocidal war on Gaza and settler-colonial violence around the world. This session will explore the ways in which the physicality of war and its knowledge production dynamics, both accentuate, necessitate, makes imperative the rethinking of normative geographies and political ecologies, across Palestine and the Americas. By opening up a conversation among critical scholars, we flesh out the dynamics of decolonialization as praxis.
A Listening Session
Equity and Inclusion Work in Hostile Political Climates
- Date: 3/27/2025
- Time: 4:10 PM - 5:30 PM
- Location: 141, Level 1, Huntington Place
As of Fall 2024, fourteen states have passed into law legislation that restricts some or all DEI efforts in public colleges and universities. Other, less obvious restrictions have been put into place curtailing DEI activities in other states. The 2023 Supreme Court decision in SFFA v. Harvard, which effectively ended the use of race as one factor in college admissions, has had uneven effects on student bodies across the country. Amid these institutional and legal changes, there have also been new restrictions on speech implemented on numerous campuses in response to student antiwar and divestment activism in Spring 2024, which many view as geared toward quashing pro-Palestine dissent. In the days following the presidential election, Black middle school, high school, and college students across the country received racist text messages threatening a return to slavery. The targeting of Black students sends a message that education is not for them. As we gather in Detroit in the months following Inauguration, this session aims to provide a space to share thoughts on how the political landscape is reshaping equity and inclusion efforts and strategies for moving forward informed by commitments to justice.
Green Colonialism, Ecocide, and the Liberation Struggle in Palestine
Energy & Environment Specialty Group plenary
- Date: 3/24/2025
- Time: 4:10 PM - 5:30 PM
- Location: 310A, Level 3, Huntington Place
Gaza stands as a profound embodiment of resistance against ecocide and the settler-colonial logic of elimination. For decades, its ecosystems have endured deliberate devastation, where energy and water siege perpetuate daily crises, and ecological collapse intensifies human vulnerability. This ecocide is not incidental but a calculated strategy of Israeli settler colonialism designed to erase indigenous claims to land, sever socio-ecological ties, and entrench systems of dispossession. This talk foregrounds Gaza and the rest of Palestine’s resistance, framing it as a defiant act of reclaiming environmental and political agency. Through everyday acts of resilience—rooted in mending relationships with the land—green colonialism is challenged and alternative narratives of empowerment amidst ongoing oppression emerge.