This event, co-organised with the Department of Sociology at LSE, is a launch of Dr Nasser Abourahme's latest book The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony published by Duke University Press.

In The Time beneath the Concrete, Nasser Abourahme argues that settler colonialism is always as much an attempt to conquer time as it is to conquer land. Abourahme shows how Palestinian refugee camps become the primary place where settler colonial attempts to dominate space and time encounter Indigenous refusal. Seen from the camps, Israel becomes a settler colonial project defined by its inability to move past the past—a project stuck at its foundational moment of conquest. At the same time, the Palestinian insistence on return is a refusal to abide by the closure of the past into settler futurity. In this book, Abourahme's looks at how the Palestinian struggle does not just happen in the open time of dispossession; it happens over this time.

Meet our speakers and chair

Nasser Abourahme is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin College. Abourahme works between comparative colonial history, political geography, and political theory. He completed his PhD at Columbia University in 2018, was previously a fellow at the Humanities Council and the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University. 

Muna Dajani is an LSE Fellow in Environment at the Department of Geography and Environment, LSE. Dajani is an action researcher with a background in critical political ecology. Her work aims to understand environmental and water governance through decolonial and critical lenses.

Sara Salem is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at LSE. Her main research interests include political sociology, postcolonial studies, Marxist theory, feminist theory, and global histories of empire and imperialism.