Sherena Razek

Brown University, Department of Modern Culture and Media

2025 Co-Winner (Humanities)

Nakba Ecologies: On Elemental Intifada in Colonized Palestine

Dr. Sherena Razek reconceptualizes the Palestinian struggle for liberation as a profound ecological catastrophe. Mobilizing an evocative archive of Palestinian photography, film, poetry, and land-based artistic practices, she posits that Palestinian refusal of settler colonial extraction and elimination manifests as an “Elemental Intifada.” This Palestinian uprising, she demonstrates, emerges from the land itself across four critical domains: water, fire, earth, and air. Ultimately, her study reveals a liberation struggle waged in the very elements themselves—in the defiant thirst of a dying river, the haunting exposure of a wildfire, and the fugitive journey of smuggled soil.

The dissertation was completed at Brown University in the Department of Modern Culture and Media under the supervision of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

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