Learning & Unlearning Palestine Part 1: Who Can Speak on Palestine?

Nour Joudah is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA. She holds a PhD in Geography from UCLA, where her dissertation examined Palestinian and native Hawaiian communities’ efforts to imagine liberated futures through indigenous countermapping practices. She is working on a book manuscript, Future Histories, exploring how indigenous experiences of time in Palestine and Hawaii inform liberation struggles. She also holds an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University.

Al-Shabaka Member Maha Nassar is an assistant professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. She holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. Her book, Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (Stanford University Press, 2017) examines how Palestinian intellectuals in Israel have connected to global decolonization movements through literary and journalistic writings. Nassar is also a Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project. Her pieces have appeared in The Washington Post, The Conversation, Middle East Report and elsewhere.

Dina Matar is Professor of Political Communication and Arab Media and Chair of the Department of Media Studies at SOAS. Her research focuses on the intersection of politics and communication, media and conflict, and memory studies in the Middle East. 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), and co-editor of several volumes including Gaza as Metaphor (2016) and Archiving Gaza in the Present (2025). She is co-founder of the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication and co-editor of the SOAS Palestine Studies series.