24 February 2026, 5-7pm GMT

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/actforpal-webinar-archiving-in-the-present-power-and-threat-tickets-1982662336420

I recall during the siege of Beirut obsessively telling friends and family there … that they ought to record, write down their experiences; it seemed crucial as a starting point.                                                                                                                 — Edward Said, “Permission to Narrate”, 1984

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.

Tahrir Hamdi is Professor of Anti-Colonial and Resistance Literature and President of Arab Open University – Jordan. She is the recipient of the 2023 International Palestine Book Award (Counter-Current category) for Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National Identity. In 2020, she was awarded the Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation’s Arab Researchers’ Award in the Humanities. Hamdi serves as Assistant Editor of Arab Studies Quarterly, founded in 1979 by Edward Said and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, and is Associate Editor of the journal Janus Unbound. She is also a member of the editorial board of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, published by Edinburgh University Press. In addition, she co-edited Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Works, which was shortlisted for the 2025 Palestine Book Award.

Claire Launchbury researches cultural and civil society responses to and construction of postwar memory discourses in Lebanon. She has been a visiting researcher at AUB and a visiting lecturer at Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut. Recent publications include “Transiting Beirut’s Post-Civil-war Memory” in The Cultural Memory of the Lebanese Civil War Revisited, edited by Leyla Dakhli and Klaus Wieland (Brill, 2025). She edited Transnational French Studies (Liverpool University Press, 2023) with Charles Forsdick and the volume Urban Bridges, Global Capital(s): Trans-Mediterranean Francospheres (Liverpool University Press, 2021) with Megan C. MacDonald. She has bylines in Le Monde diplomatique, Le Monde and The Markaz Review. She serves on the advisory board for the New Directions in Francophone Studies: Diversity, Decolonisation, Queerness series at Edinburgh University Press.

Dina Matar is Professor of Political Communication and Arab Media at SOAS. Her research and teaching are focused on the intersection of politics and communication, media and conflict, cultural politics, diasporas, activist cultures and media and memory studies, focusing on the Middle East. She is co-founder of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication and serves on the editorial collective of Communication, Culture and Critique Journal.  She is the author of What it Means to be Palestinian: Stories of Palestinian Peoplehood (2010); co-author of The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication (2012); co-editor of Narrating Conflict in the Middle East (2013); Gaza as Metaphor (2016) and Producing Palestine (2024) and editor of She (forthcoming). She is co-editor of the Political Communication in the Middle East and North Africa series and the SOAS Palestine Studies series.

Venetia Porter is the former Senior Curator for Islamic and Contemporary Middle East Art at the British Museum, where she is currently Honorary Research Fellow. One of her roles at the museum was to build a significant collection of works on paper, which included works by Palestinian artists, who have featured in recent exhibitions and publications. These include Reflections: Contemporary Art of the Middle East and North Africa, with Natasha Morris and Charles Tripp (British Museum Press, 2020) and Artists Making Books: Poetry to Politics (British Museum Press, 2023).