The Department of Rhetoric | Colloquia Series | Spring 2025

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, which emerged from the British imperial expansion and still retains the same paradigms that inform all the geo/climate sciences, lacking the intimacy of local, indigenous knowledges and relations.