New Geographies of Palestine/Palestinians

Abstract

Over the past decade, there has been a significant increase in the amount of geographical scholarship on Palestine and/or Palestinians. This paper draws this scholarship together to make three arguments. First, this work has proliferated to the point where geographies of Palestine and Palestinians are a substantive area of study in their own right. Second, that there has been a concomitant diversification in the ways in which the peoples and places that constitute Palestine have been envisioned. While geopolitics has traditionally been used to apprehend Palestinian geographies, particularly in relation to the Occupied Territories, there are now a number of studies that employ other epistemological approaches and engage with Palestinians in other spatial contexts. Third, I argue that this diversification mirrors broader changes in political activism vis-à-vis Palestine, and that many of the studies I review here function as a kind of solidarity scholarship to practices of cross-state citizen activism. This article contributes to such an ethos by using the act of review as a critical geographical tool, to claim conceptual space for Palestine and Palestinians. This raises further questions about the material spaces and spacings geographers of Palestinian and Palestinians are individually and collectively proposing.