Visualizing Gaza: Healing, Recovery, and Restoration
Center for Middle East Studies, Brown University
Watson School of International and Public Affairs, 111 Thayer Street
This event discusses the possibilities of visualizing Gaza’s healing, recovery and rebuilding and the restoration of its demolished heritage. The talk will follow the “Phoenix of Gaza XR” exhibit and explore the use of media, urban planning, digital archiving, and virtual reality in Gaza before and during the war. In doing so, it will also examine how digitization, urban planning, visualization and virtual reality technologies can be applied toward repair and reconstruction to advance restorative justice and revitalization.
SPEAKERS
Ahlam Muhtaseb is a professor of media studies at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) and a senior data justice fellow with Princeton’s Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. She has an M.A. in Journalism and a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Memphis, Tennessee. She is the recipient of the 2024 Women Support Organization’s Distinguished Woman of the Year award and the 2024 Activism and Social Justice Scholarly Influence Award by the National Communication Association’s (NCA’s) Activism and Social Justice Division. She is also the recipient of the 2020 CSUSB Outstanding Scholarship, Research and Creative Activities Award and the 2019-20 Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Faculty Mentor Awardees. In 2019, she won the Rebuilding Alliance “Story Teller” Award. Her research interests include digital communication, digital resistance, decolonization, social justice and diasporic communities. She is the co-founder and faculty director of the Gaza xReal project: The Phoenix of Gaza.
Mazen Iwaisi is currently an Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow Academic Year 2025-26 at Columbia University. He earned his PhD from Queen’s University Belfast, examining the concept of Archaeolopolitics in the Making of the Palestinian National Spatial Plan, with funding from the Palestinian American Research Center and Corrymeela Community in Northern Ireland. Mazen is currently working with Brian Boyd, Jamal Barghouth and other scholars on the Archaeology of the Nakba project “From Memory to Place.”
Naim Abu Raddi is currently a Data Justice Fellow at Princeton University. He is also pursuing a PhD in media studies and teaching in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Phoenix of Gaza XR, a nationally and internationally recognized immersive media project that documents life in Gaza, highlighting its history, culture, and resilience.
Orwa Switat is a postdoctoral research associate in Palestinian studies at the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University. Switat is an urban planning scholar with degrees in philosophy, political science, and urban planning. He focuses on the status of groups in planning theory and practice. He has been a Religion and Public Life Fellow in Conflict and Peace at Harvard Divinity School and a visiting scholar in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. In his research, he integrates digitization and visualization with discourse and planning analysis to uncover hidden histories, restore lost heritages, spatialize oral histories, visualize counter-hegemonic narratives, and develop innovative restorative planning approaches.
