The Colonial Laboratory

The world continues to witness an unfolding genocide in Palestine where tactics and technologies of domination and resistance continue recreate themselves, in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, and beyond. This panel expands on what are ‘colonial technologies of contestation’ in a global space of which colonial technologies get reworked onto different geographies. To imagine “the colonial laboratory" is to imagine that there is an exchange/circulation of knowledges that take place of not simply colonial “technologies”. Dr. Laleh Khalili’s work focuses on technologies as tactics of domination, subjugation, counterinsurgency, and capitalism, to sever Indigenous peoples from their land relations. These technologies are constantly being reworked and contested - by continued forms of seed saving, planting, intergenerational oral histories of foodways, and asserting Indigenous forms of existence. Dr. Natasha Aruri will present collectively created work called Takhayali (imagine), where women from Ein Qenia in the occupied West Bank speak of their liberation futures. Aruri will draw connections to how these women place themselves in relation to other urban spaces globally, like Egypt, Bolivia, India.

Laleh Khalili

Laleh Khalili is a professor of Gulf Studies at Exeter and the author of Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso, 2020) and Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy (Profile Books, 2025).

Natasha Aruri | نتاشا عاروري

Urbanist, researcher, coordinator. Her work focuses on the spatial politics of and resistance to colonialism, community-based design, and the intersection of critical mapping and social mobilisation towards transforming spaces and policies. She served as a visiting lecturer at several universities, as Professor of Urban Planning at Dessau Institute of Architecture (2018-2020), and as Postdoctoral Researcher and Coordinator at K LAB, TU-Berlin (2019-2023). She is co-founder/director of UR°bana, an interdisciplinary research and design studio that implemented the Takhayali project in Ramallah (2018-2025, takhayali.net). She has several publications in journals and magazines, and is an editor and co-author of the book "Critical Mapping for Municipalist Mobilisation. Housing struggles in Belgrade, Berlin, Barcelona" (2024, cmmm.eu).

Danya Nadar

Danya Nadar is a PhD Candidate at the University of Antwerp and technically assists the FRICTION project housed in the Labo Agroécologie. Her work focuses on ways Indigenous peasants use their ancestral ecological knowledge to resist colonial and capitalist encroachments in their territories. She researches how different colonial technologies are used in attempting to rupture Indigenous land relations, to later be reworked in different geographies.