Malkit Shoshan and Womxn in Design: “Designing Within Conflict: Building for Peace”

International Womxn’s Week includes a weeklong series of events organized by Womxn in Design that gather members of the GSD community to learn about and challenge notions of gender and power from within the framework of design.

Event Description

A Desert-Focused Conversation with Dr. Suhad Bishara

As part of Malkit Shoshan’s year-long appointment as this year’s Senior Loeb Scholar, she will host Dr. Suhad Bishara, a human rights lawyer and the Legal Director of Adalah, a Haifa-based human rights organization, for a conversation about the challenges confronting communities in the desert region of Israel.

As a landscape, the desert registers the enduring history of territorial boundaries, and it is a place where spatial policies are often used to facilitate the displacement of indigenous communities from their nomadic and semi-nomadic lifestyles in favor of state control. In the case of the Negev/Naqab desert in the south of Israel, nomadic and semi-nomadic routes as well as homes and grazing fields have been swiftly transformed into new towns, lone farms, nature reserves, monoculture pine forests, military bases, and industrial zones.

Such displacement—often prompted by rezoning or other state-sanctioned repurposing of the landscape—has forcibly uprooted many Bedouins from their livelihoods and cultural heritage, compelling them to settle in densely populated localities. Others who have resisted relocation find themselves subjected to multidimensional violence that is justified by state policy on land use, including militarized raids and the destruction of Bedouin settlements.

Speakers

Malkit Shoshan is a designer, author, and educator. She is the founding director of the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST), which initiates and develops projects at the intersection of architecture, urban planning and human rights. In her work, she uses spatial design tools to make visible systemic violence, engage with various publics to co-design alternatives that center social and environmental justice, and advocate for systemic change.

Shoshan is a design critic in Urban Planning at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and a visiting scholar at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge. She is the author and mapmaker of the award-winning book “Atlas of the Conflict, Israel-Palestine” (010 Publishers, 2011), the co-author of “Village. One Land Two Systems and Platform Paradise” (Damiani Editore, 2014), and the author and illustrator of “BLUE: The Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions” (Actar, 2023). Her additional publications include “Zoo, or the letter Z, just after Zionism” (NAiM, 2012), “Drone” (DPR-Barcelona, 2016), “Spaces of Conflict” (JapSam books, 2016), “Greening Peacekeeping: The Environmental Impact of UN Peace Operations” (IPI, 2018), and “Retreat” (DPR-Barcelona, 2020). Her work has been published and exhibited internationally. In 2021, she was awarded, together with FAST, the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for their collaborative presentation “Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip.”

Dr. Suhad Bishara, Advocate | Legal Director and Director of the Land and Planning Rights Unit at Adalah
Suhad serves as Adalah’s Legal Director and has worked with Adalah since 2001. Suhad specializes in land and planning rights. She has more than 23 years of experience litigating cases before the Israeli Supreme Court and served as lead lawyer in major human rights cases regarding Palestinian citizens of Israel and international humanitarian law cases concerning Palestinians in the 1967 Occupied Territory before the Israeli Supreme Court. Previously, she served as a legal consultant to the Association of Forty, the Arab Steering Committee for Urban Planning in the Galilee Society, and the Hotline for Battered Women. Suhad is also one of the founders of Kayan – A Feminist Organization. She received an LL.B. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an LL.M. in Public Service Law from New York University’s School of Law (USA), and a PhD at the King’s College School of Law in London. She was also a Palestine & Law Fellow at Columbia University Law School.

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