Dr. Sherena Razek

“Nakba as Wounding Ecology”

April 2, 2026

12:15 - 1:45 pm

Haines Hall 352

Abstract: As the planet continues to rapidly heat up alongside the world destroying expansions of empire, how might the Palestinian condition uniquely inform how we conceive of climate crisis and the Nakba as a wounding ecology? Bridging land and flesh, symbol and earth, and centering the planetary and elemental urgency of Palestine, this talk deconstructs common anthropocentric assumptions that cast settler colonization, indigenous resistance, and climate catastrophe within distinctive trajectories of study and struggle.

Bio Sherena Razek is a diasporic Palestinian feminist educator, scholar, activist, and labor organizer. Currently, she is a President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. She holds a PhD from the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University where she was the President of the Graduate Labor Organization and co-founder of the Palestine Solidarity Caucus. She will begin as Assistant Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UMass Boston this coming fall. Her research focuses on Palestinian visual culture, anti-imperialist struggle, and decolonial feminist ecologies. Her first book project (in progess) is currently titled “Nakba Ecologies: On Elemental Intifada in Colonized Palestine.” It offers a grounded intervention in the emergent field of elemental media studies, by tethering the classical elements of water, fire, earth and air to their specific valences in Palestinian film, photography, performance, ecopoetics, and counter archives. She received the 2025 Malcolm H. Kerr dissertation award from the Middle East Studies Association for the dissertation upon which the book manuscript is based. Her curatorial work has addressed the politics and aesthetics of surveillance, oceanic degradation, and the militarization and materialization of nation-state borders between the Global North and the Global South. Her writing appears in The Journal of Palestine Studies, Women and Performance, InVisible Culture, and Social Text.