ActforPal Webinar: Archiving in the Present – Power and Threat

The need to record and witness in times of destruction, disappearance and elimination has become most visibly evident in Israel’s livestreamed genocide in Gaza. This webinar will ground its discussion in the intellectual and ethical responsibility to archive the present, as a creative and central practice of Palestinian knowledge production. It will ask questions about what archiving in the present means, and how this is linked to the past and future. Why are colonial powers and settler-colonial regimes, such as Israel’s, insisting on the violent erasure of archives, alongside ethnic cleansing and the various ‘cides’ that form genocide? What does archiving in the present tell us about Palestinians in Gaza, their resistance and resilience, as well as their determination to live and tell?

In this webinar hosted by the Academic Action Network for Palestine (www.actforpal.org), these questions and others will be discussed by Professor Dina Matar and Dr. Venetia Porter, co-editors of the recently published book Archiving Gaza in the Present: Memory, Culture and Erasure (Saqi Books, 2025), along with ActforPal member Dr. Claire Launchbury. The event will be moderated by Professor Tahrir Hamdi.

Tickets for this webinar are free
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