Uppsala University, Sweden, 27-28 May 2025

Organized by Patrick Anthony (Uppsala University), Cristian M. Torres Gutiérrez (University of Oslo), and Hirra Ateeq (Newham Archives, London)

The ReOrient Conference seeks to open dialogue between academics and archivists around decolonial practice and pluralist memory politics. At heart, the conference is an exercise in methods of analysis and archiving that disrupt colonialist thinking about human difference, particularly the Orientalist idea of absolute distance between Western modernity and non-European “others.” In practical terms, this means promoting multi-cultural histories concealed in archives, developing practices that make those histories publicly accessible, and so, transforming archives into tools for reparative justice and Indigenous heritage.

As decolonization is fundamentally about the return of land to its legitimate inhabitants, several panels discuss landscape as a vital archive of (and against) colonialism and capitalism. From the coastal dunes of Vietnam’s Khmer region and pollen pathways of Central Asia to nature reserves in occupied Palestine and Amazonian plant knowledge, ecological archives contest the eliminationist logics of world markets and Western empires.

These “living archives” underscore the argument that cultural heritage institutions are not merely repositories of the past, but active participants in on-going liberation struggles. Several panelists spotlight digital archives from Denmark to Lebanon as critical methods of “counter-mapping” and “archiving against genocide.” As we bear witness to genocide in Gaza and its concomitant “scholasticide” (Nabulsi 2009) and “memoricide” (Pappé 2008), a keynote lecture from Dr. Jamila Ghaddar sets the agenda for “liberatory memory work.”

Underpinning these projects are decolonial practices developed by featured archivists whose work in Britain, Australia, Amazonia, and the Levant resists Indigenous erasure, redresses racialized language and imagery, and re-thinks cataloging as “caretaking” (Odumosu 2020). The ReOrient Conference adds to this agenda a robust toolkit for pluralist memory politics drawn variously from anthropology, ethnobotany, and environmental studies, histories of media, emotions, and material culture, and even the dramatization of repressed voices. Trivialized tailors, censored resistors, plantation prospects, and Indigenous ontologies once written out of the historical record are re-centered in a conference that engages archives as actors—or perhaps activists—in the contemporary world.

Public Keynote Lecture

Towards a decolonial archival praxis: Fighting erasure, archiving against genocide from Palestine to Lebanon by Dr. Jamila Ghaddar (Amsterdam University)

Tuesday May 27, 15.15 - 16.45, Universitetshuset Sal IV

Register by following this link or scanning the QR-code

Fighting Erasure: Digitizing Gaza's Genocide and the War on Lebanon is a comprehensive project documenting the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and countering Zionist colonization and Orientalist myth-making by preserving local histories. Co-led by Drs. Jamila Ghaddar, Rami Zurayk and Hanine Shehadeh with local and global partners and collaborators, including Dr. Mariam Karim and Ghada Dimashq, the project includes advocacy and capacity building activities, archival rescue and recovery efforts, and the critical work of archiving and providing access to what may become one of the most thoroughly documented genocides in history. Outlining the radical decolonial feminist ethos underlying the project’s archiving in place framework (Ghaddar 2023), we consider how the destruction and remaking of all traces of the past – from archives and heritage sites to natural habitats and lived environments – are key to the process of indigenous erasure in Palestine and Lebanon. Home demolitions and the uprooting of olive trees are as iconic of Israeli colonization and genocide as checkpoints, torture and starvation. Such erasures include the 530+ villages and towns eradicated during the 1948 Nakba and the many more since; settlement expansion across the West Bank; and the wholesale levelling of Gaza along with the marginalization and building over of Palestinian lived environments within the 1948 borders. Similarly, the wholesale razing of Lebanese villages, historical and religious sites along with the burning of mountains, and appropriation of waterways is a decades’ old Zionist practice that seeks, unsuccessfully so far, to pave the way for the settlement and takeover of South Lebanon. We think through this contest over archives, land and memory to build on previous theorizing on working towards a decolonial archival praxis (Ghaddar & Caswell 2019) while emphasizing the need to cultivate hope in liberatory memory work.

The Conference and Keynote are supported by the European Union and the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.