RGP Cycle One Grantees and Projects
Samia Al-Botmeh, Linda Tabar, Yazid Anani: Neoliberalism and the Transformations of Rural Palestine: the Case of Rawabi
This research project seeks to examine the neoliberal commodification of land and corporate land grabbing, from the perspective of rural Palestine and investigate its impact on rural communities, while exploring these processes within the situated realities of the Palestinian encounter with Zionist settler colonialism. The project will focus on the case of Rawabi, a large-scale housing project north of Ramallah, and it will explore Rawabi’s impact on the surrounding villages on whose agricultural land the exclusive housing complex is being built. The research will analyze the transformations that are taking place at three levels: firstly, it will explore how the rural (as a geographic space, as communities, as largely peasant existence and a way of life on the land) is being transformed and remolded, and how the very idea of the rural is being redefined to facilitate new forms of predatory capital extraction, and export the Ramallah model to rural Palestine. Secondly, the research will analyze the socio-economic impact of the land grab and the subsequent changes in land ownership, as situated within in a settler colonial context; are villagers being depleted of their assets, are assets being transferred from one class to another, how are land prices being effected, and is a creeping process of gentrification taking place in these villages? Thirdly, the research will look at how this neoliberal restructuring is reshaping everyday life; and will look at how these transformations are also attempting to redefine the subjectivity of the colonized.
Samia Al-Botmeh is the director of the Centre for Development Studies at Birzeit University and an assistant professor in economics. She has completed her PhD at the School of African and Oriental Studies- University of London, in labour economics, the title of her thesis: 'Palestinian Women’s Labour Supply: Towards an Explanation of Low and Fluctuating Female Labour Force Participation'. Samia’s areas of interest and publications are gender economics, labour economics, and political economy of development.
Linda Tabar holds a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Women and Gender Studies Institute (WGSI) in the University of Toronto. Her research interests are situated at the intersection of Middle East Studies, Political Economy, and Post-Colonial Studies. Before joining WGSI she led a research programme on alternatives to mainstream development and neoliberalism, at the Centre for Development Studies, Birzeit University. Dr Tabar is the co-author of The Emergence of a Palestinian Globalised Elite: Donors, International NGOs and Local NGOs. She is co-editing an upcoming journal special issue entitled After Oslo: Settler Colonialism, Neoliberal Development and Liberation in Palestine. Her writings on Palestinian memory, resistance and the ways in which international aid regime and humanitarian interventions reinforce colonial designs have appeared in various journals and edited volumes.
Yazid Anani born in 1975, Ramallah, is an assistant professor at the Department of Architecture and the Master Program in Urban Planning and Landscape - Birzeit University, Palestine. Yazid Anani chaired the Academic Council of the International Art Academy Palestine 2010 - 2012. He was a EUME fellow - Forum Transregionale Studien 2012/ 2013. He is part of several collectives, and projects such as ‘Decolonizing Architecture’ & ‘Ramallah Syndrome’ and has curated and co-curated several projects such as ‘Urban Cafés’, 'Palestinian Cities - Visual Contention’ and the 2nd, 3rd and 4th editions of Cities Exhibition and took part in several art projects. Anani lectured and published internationally on issues of architecture and urban transformations, colonial spaces and power relations, public art and public spaces and art education.
