Conference Agenda

The Israeli War on the Gaza Strip since October 7th, 2023 has inflicted severe damage on Gaza's cultural heritage. This paper traces the damage and highlights how the Israeli War destroyed almost every element that shapes and forms Palestinian collective and private memory. The destruction of archives, libraries, and cultural institutions erases historical records and disrupts the transmission of knowledge and cultural continuity for future generations. The loss of these cultural landmarks highlights the urgent necessity for measures to safeguard cultural heritage in conflict zones, ensuring the preservation of history and identity for affected communities. In light of these challenges, it is imperative for Palestinian institutions, both private and official, to take proactive measures to protect and preserve their archives. This includes implementing digital archiving solutions, establishing unified archiving standards across Palestine, and seeking international support to safeguard their cultural heritage. Additionally, there is a pressing need for international organizations, such as the United Nations and UNESCO, to take a clear stand against the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage and to intervene to prevent further losses.

South Lebanon’s landscapes, marked by scars of conflict, function as a palimpsest of violence, resistance, and resilience. This paper examines how historical and ecological imprints across centuries—shaped by Ottoman land reforms, colonial taxation, and modern military incursions—have transformed the region into a living archive. From the French punitive expeditions in the 1920s that led to widespread impoverishment to the pre-1948 Zionist gang attacks, followed by the displacement of communities during the Nakba and the ecological destruction wrought by cluster munitions in the 2006 war, South Lebanon’s landscape is etched with layered narratives of trauma and renewal. Millennial terraces lost to abandonment, centuries-old olive trees uprooted and stolen, deep aquifers hollowed by intensive export-driven farming, forests lost to the brutality of war and capital—the landscape bears witness to the cyclical violence that constantly reshapes it. Recent devastation, such as the 2023 war on Lebanon and the widespread use of incendiary munitions to torch the land, has exacerbated these wounds, blackening agricultural lands and poisoning rivers. Yet, amidst destruction, the strength and antifragility of local communities emerge through efforts to repel aggressors, rehabilitate ecosystems, and rebuild livelihoods. By conceptualizing the land as a palimpsest—a surface where histories are inscribed and reinscribed—this study reveals the intertwined stories of human defiance and ecological adversity, arguing for a deeper recognition of landscapes as archives of memory and survival. This framework offers a critical lens for understanding the enduring impact of violence on the natural world and the communities that inhabit it.

In this paper, I argue there has been an unacknowledged influence of Indigenous social thought on 20th century European social theory. These Indigenous cosmologies have provided an unrecognized influence in our public institutions of heritage and our archival theory. I examine Franz Boas’s study of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples of Canada’s west coast to trace the most influential example of Indigenous social organization on European thought. The resultant influence of Kwak’wala social principles on 20th century European social theory began with Marcel Mauss’ study, The Gift. Mauss’ work, referencing Kwakwaka’wakw examples from Boas, focussed on gift exchange in social theory. It impacted enormously mid-century European social theory as well as perspectives on French colonialism. The influence is evident in such work as Claude Lévis-Strauss’ work La Pensée Sauvage as well as Jacques Derrida’s Donner le temps: la fausse monnaie. Without acknowledgement, or even recognition, late 20th century archival theorists, firmly rooted in the critical theory of the mid to late 20th century, in fact were influenced by the social organization of west coast Indigenous communities at the turn of the 19th century. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called on the Canadian archival community to reassess their principles and policies considering the colonial history of Canadian public archives. I argue this reassessment must go deeper. We cannot simply rehabilitate past unjust practices. Before we can consider the nature of our re-imagined public houses of culture, heritage, and identity, we must consider the epistemological imperialism over issues of social identity and social memory. We need to develop new cognitive spaces of social understanding, recognizing the contribution of Indigenous immanent cognitive meaning and social organization, if ever we are to construct an archival theory free of colonial judgment and create a truly post-colonial archival theory.

The International Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement empowers Indigenous peoples to assert ownership and control over data, enabling them to inform self-determined priorities and goals. In alignment with this, the International Council on Archives Tandanya-Adelaide Declaration calls for the recognition of Indigenous peoples' rights to control their archives, advocating for a radical transformation of archival practices. Recognising the vital importance of archives for truth-telling, justice-seeking, and healing, Dr. Kirsten Thorpe (Worimi) will share examples of research and projects underway in Australia that emphasise Indigenous-led archival methods and approaches. She will explore opportunities for institutional archives to enhance the care and management of records, supporting Indigenous well-being and the development of Indigenous Living Archives on Country.

Dr. Hanine Shehadeh will discuss the work of the Fighting Erasure project to utilize digital storytelling and data visualization tools and techniques to develop an interactive website that features accessible, detailed, and interactive documentation of the violence in Gaza, elsewhere in Palestine, and South Lebanon, as captured in the Digital Archive on the Gaza Genocide and War on Lebanon, with a focus on its human, environmental, cultural, and political dimensions (Shehadeh 2023; see also Shehadeh 2024). In collaboration with the University of Tokyo and Al-Jazeera English, this activity includes developing a website that serves as a comprehensive platform dedicated to documenting the ongoing genocide in Gaza and preserving the stories, evidence, and historical context of this humanitarian crisis. It brings together extensive research, eyewitness accounts, legal frameworks, and multimedia resources to provide a holistic understanding of the atrocities and their impact on the people of Gaza. It includes a storytelling initiative that focuses on families erased from historical records, reconnecting people with their land, and preserving the deep ties between land and people. The storytelling will explore all aspects of the war, including the destruction of cultural heritage, the impact on the education and health sectors, and the stories of victims. By documenting and making accessible these narratives, the initiative aims to shed light on the human and cultural dimensions of the ongoing conflict.

I would like to talk about the role of indigenous erasure in the genocide unfolding in Palestine and in the course of the War on Lebanon, and how the destruction of lived environments is a key part of that process. Conversely, Palestinian and Lebanese archival and historical initiatives work tirelessly to reconstruct these lived environments and maintain them as living memory from generation to generation -- from the 530+ villages and towns destroyed during the Nakba to the many more eradicated after the 1967 seizure of the remainder of Palestine, from the relentless Judiazation of Jerusalem neighborhood by neighborhood to the settlement expansion across the West Bank, and from the wholesale levelling of Gaza to the near complete writing and building over of Palestinian lived environments within the 1948 borders. Home demolitions and the burning of olive groves has become as iconic of Israeli apartheid and genocide as the checkpoints and fighter jets. In this context, I will speak to and elaborate the radical antiracist feminist praxis underlying archival initiatives currently underway in Lebanon and Palestine to counter erasures of people, places and events.

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Conclusion: Archiving in Place for Liberation and Return

Archival education is both a means of empowerment and epistemic erasure. Due to the Eurocentric and colonial history of international archivy, the canon of archival education centers on the care and stewardship of textual paper records created by colonial regimes over any other types of historical evidence. Thus, both archival professionals and archives are shaped by a tacit understanding that records of colonizing powers are infallible as objective evidence while oral testimonies from refugees, members of indigenous communities, and otherwise marginalized individuals are presented as biased and unreliable. In the context of the Global South, subjugation is often enacted upon people when they are made subjects of official records in colonial archives while those archives and archival education are made inaccessible to them.

How do we teach archival theory and best practices without replicating epistemic domination? In the Fundamentals of Archival Management & Emergency Mitigation in Palestine, Lebanon & the Global South course, the Fighting Erasure team works to ensure that course participants attain mastery of archival fundamentals and standards while maintaining a critical lens on the ties between archives, records management, racism, colonialism, and western imperialism. By centering the needs of course participants in each class, both members of the teaching team and students are able to interrogate how prescribed standards and methods do or do not meet the needs of students as they steward collections that fall outside of colonial frameworks. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire described a problem-posing method of liberatory education where teachers and students work alongside one another as “critical co-investigators in dialogue” (p. 81). Through their approach to the Fundamentals course, the Fighting Erasure team provides a path for pedagogical approaches that move away from what Freire dubbed “education as the practice of domination” and towards archival pedagogy as the “practice of freedom” (p. 81) for both educators and students.

It is widely acknowledged that archives continue to hold a colonial legacy due to their close relationship to state power. The success of colonial conquest has been greatly aided by the violent production of colonial knowledge in which colonizers gather, construct, and obstruct information so as to legitimize the narratives of those in power while denying legitimacy to non-Western epistemologies of archival creatorship and stewardship. In the case of Palestine, Palestinian archival and cultural material is continuously destroyed or looted. Then, due to structural and systemic apartheid, Palestinians are unable to physically access their own records in the colonizer’s archives. In speaking to how colonized groups can resist archival erasure, this presentation speaks to two of the Fighting Erasure Project’s activities that promote education, advocacy, and resistance. The first project is the Archives & Heritage for Palestine Seminar series. This is a year-long series of seminars featuring scholars, practitioners, writers, and other experts and spokespeople on archives, heritage, libraries, museums in relation to Palestine. The series uplifts Palestinian scholars and promotes their work on an international scale within the archives and heritage sector at a time when Palestinian archives are violently under threat. The second project is a training course, entitled Fundamentals of Archival Management & Emergency Mitigation in Palestine, Lebanon & the Global South. The course specifically teaches how to manage and preserve records in all formats while working with limited resources and infrastructures as well as how to engage in disaster mitigation, rescue and recovery in times of conflict and natural disasters from a Global South perspective. Together, these projects work to educate and advocate for the safeguarding of Palestinian heritage, history, and memory in libraries, archives, galleries and museums. In doing so, these projects work against the violence of colonial knowledge production by building and supporting Palestinian archivists’ archival capacities.

The destruction of cultural heritage is a deliberate act of erasure that aims to obliterate identity, memory, and history. During the 2024 Israeli war on Lebanon, significant cultural heritage sites, including World Heritage Sites like the Roman ruins in Baalbek and Tyre, were severely damaged or destroyed. This targeted destruction not only devastated Lebanon’s physical history but also threatened its intangible cultural legacy. Drawing on the Fighting Erasure project, this presentation examines the systematic destruction of cultural heritage during wars, focusing on Lebanon. It analyzes the scale of destruction, the deliberate targeting of cultural assets, and the profound implications for Lebanon’s historical memory and cultural identity, highlighting how war is used as a tool for cultural and identity erasure. The Fighting Erasure project integrates archival documentation, digital tools, and collaborative networks to safeguard endangered heritage. It aims to combat erasure by preserving cultural memory and identity through comprehensive documentation, preservation strategies, and international collaboration. This presentation will propose actionable steps to address the challenges of protecting and restoring cultural heritage in the aftermath of war, offering a framework for resilience and recovery that resists attempts to erase history and identity.

The destruction of cultural heritage is a calculated attack on identity, memory, and history, intended to erase the existence of a people. In Gaza, a region of profound historical and cultural significance, the systematic obliteration of cultural heritage has unfolded through repeated cycles of war, neglect, and, most recently, the genocide. This ongoing destruction targets not only ancient archaeological sites, historical landmarks, libraries, and archives but also the intangible expressions of culture that shape collective identity and memory. This presentation will explore the deliberate erasure of Gaza’s cultural heritage, its devastating impact on Palestinian identity, and the critical role of initiatives like the Fighting Erasure project in preserving and protecting cultural narratives under siege. The project seeks to counter this erasure through collaborative documentation, digital archiving, and international solidarity. It recognizes that cultural heritage is inseparable from identity, sovereignty, and resistance against dehumanization and dispossession. The destruction in Gaza has been compounded by the international community’s failure to enforce protections for cultural heritage in conflict zones. Mosques, churches, ancient ruins, and libraries have been reduced to rubble without meaningful efforts for documentation, preservation, or accountability. The absence of action amplifies the loss, leaving communities stripped of their cultural anchors and silencing the stories embedded in these sites. Through detailed case studies and visual documentation, this presentation will illustrate the scale and intent behind the destruction of Gaza’s heritage. It will address the challenges of documenting cultural loss in a besieged region where access to resources and technology is limited, underscoring the importance of leveraging digital tools and collaborative networks to ensure that cultural memory endures. The Fighting Erasure project offers a framework for resistance by creating a digital archive that preserves evidence of destruction, amplifies Palestinian voices, and challenges the narratives that devalue and delegitimize their existence. This work is not merely about protecting buildings or artifacts—it is about safeguarding identity, memory, and the right to exist. Ultimately, this presentation calls for urgent action to counter the erasure of Gaza’s cultural heritage. By documenting destruction, holding perpetrators accountable, and fostering global solidarity, we can resist the forces of dehumanization and ensure that the narratives of Gaza and its people endure. The fight to preserve Gaza’s cultural legacy is a fight to affirm identity, resist oppression, and inspire a collective responsibility to protect humanity’s shared heritage.