Dr Hashem Abushama

Academic profile

Dr Hashem Abushama is an Associate Professor in Human Geography and Tutorial Fellow at St Peter’s College. He holds a DPhil in Human Geography and an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Peace and Global Studies from Earlham College in the United States. He is also an EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin as well as a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies. He has authored several academic and journalistic articles on dispossession, arts, urbanization, the archives, and postcolonial Marxism.

Teaching

At the undergraduate level, Hashem delivers lectures for the Preliminary Examination and the Final Honours School.  He convenes an FHS option. At St Peter’s College, Hashem and his colleagues are responsible for teaching students across the breadth of geographical topics for the Preliminary Exams and the Final Honours School. 

At the postgraduate level, Hashem teaches on extraction, colonialism, and capitalism for the MSc in Nature, Society, and Environmental Governance. 

Research

Hashem is a human geographer with interests in the urban geographies of arts and capital, and the contemporary and historical geographies of dispossession within colonial and settler colonial contexts. Hashem’s training in geography is highly interdisciplinary and engages with debates in postcolonial Marxist geographies, settler colonial studies, cultural studies, and development geographies. He has two developing research projects.

Arts, cities, and settler colonies

The first is a project that examines cultural productions within contexts of settler colonialism. It has resulted in a monograph (in preparation) and a series of journal articles. The monograph, titled Cities and the Settler Colony: Accumulation, Dispossession, and Arts, examines Palestinian cultural productions in Haifa (1948 territories) and Ramallah (Occupied Palestinian Territories). Inspired by the works of Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, and Gillian Hart, it takes the cities as two connected yet distinctly different sites in the production of global capitalism and settler colonialism. By weaving together in-depth interviews, counter-mapping, visual analysis, and archival research, the monograph traces processes of socio-spatial formation to offer a materialist understanding of cultural productions that shows how neoliberal capitalism adapts itself to colonial dispossession and racialization. By bridging postcolonial and Marxist geographies, the research makes key contributions to how we understand the contradictory workings of capitalism and settler colonialism in Palestine and beyond, and how people make sense of their complex social realities.

Hashem has a parallel project, funded through a three-year summer Postdoctoral EUME Fellowship at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, that extends the analysis of cultural processes and the built environment back to Europe of the early twentieth century to examine a curious link between Dada arts and Zionism.

Arts and capital  

The second project is in the early stages and focuses on everyday processes of cultural production as entry points into examining the Arab Gulf’s rising cultural hegemony. Against the backdrop of the burgeoning literature on the Arab Gulf’s political economy, the project aims to fill a major lacuna in the literature by examining cultural processes in the Gulf and their intertwinement with capital and regional economic development.

Public scholarship

Hashem also has an interest in countermapping both as a pedagogic tool and a site of inquiry. He integrates countermapping techniques in his teaching. He also has an enthusiastic interest in food as a practice and archive and works closely with the Kitchen Marronage collective as a chef-in-residence, curating recipes, food seminars, and collaborations.

Selected publications

Peer-reviewed articles

Abushama, H. (2024). A map without guarantees: Stuart Hall and Palestinian geographies. Soundings, 2024(87), 18–37. https://doi.org/10.3898/SOUN:87.01.2024

Abushama, H. (2024). Culture and the City: Articulations of Settler Colonialism from Haifa to Ramallah and Back. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2024.2381642

Abushama, H. (2024). Mapping and countermapping dispossession in Palestine. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12708

Goffe, T. L., Gleeson, S., Abushama, H., et al (2022). The World We Became: Map Quest 2350, A Speculative Atlas Beyond Climate Crisis. Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 7(1–2), 5–49. https://doi.org/10.1163/23523085-07010002

Abushama, H. (2021). On Refugee Agency, Bio-Politics, and a New World. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 37(2), 30–37. https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.40794

Abushama, H., & Abushama, H. (2020). Politics of Portraiture: The Studio of the Krikorians. Jerusalem Quarterly. (Winner of the Ibrahim Dakkak Award for Outstanding Essay on Jerusalem)

Public scholarship

Abushama, H. (2024). ‘La Tusalih’ (No to Recognition!). Archive Stories: https://archive-stories.com. (Forthcoming, Arabic).

Abushama, H. (2024). A map without guarantees: Stuart Hall and Palestinian Geographies. Winner of the Stuart Hall Essay prize: https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/resource/a-map-without-guarantees-stuart-hall-and-palestinian-geographies/

Abushama, H. (2023). Why does Europe selectively remember its victims? Palestine Square

Abushama, H. and Farraj B. (2022). Cultural Productions from the Small Prison to the Large Prison. Jadaliyya.

Abushama, H. (2022). ‘According to Whose Archives?: The Tantura Massacre and Revisionist Israeli Historiography. Institute for Palestine Studies, Palestine Square.

Abushama, H. (2022). Video Interview. An Investigation into the Depopulated Al-Tantura Village. Middle East Eye.

Abushama, H. (2021). The Palestinian City, the Song, and Settler Colonial Gentrification, Jadaliyya. Arabic and English.  

Abushama, H. (2020).  Not Our Country: On the Palestinian Imaginaries for Liberation. Ramallah: Al Qattan Foundation. Arabic and English.

Abushama, H. (2020). Decolonising Multilingualism: Struggles to Decreate. By Alison Phipps, Journal of Refugee Studies, Volume 33, Issue 2, June 2020, Pages 460–463, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fez079