Geographer, cultural sociologist

Yara Sa’di-Ibraheem

I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Contestations of the Liberal Script,’ Freie Universität Berlin. My fields of research include indigenous geographies, settler colonialism, neoliberal urbanism, and spatial-temporal experiences. My Ph.D. thesis dealt with the ways in which neoliberal policies and discourses mutate indigenous spaces and time under settler-colonial regimes. Particularly, through micro-geography methodology, I explored the transformations of urban Palestinian properties, which were confiscated by the Israeli state in the aftermath of the Nakba – 1948 War, as a consequence of neoliberal regeneration and privatization schemes. My current project focuses on displacement and dispossession as a point of entry into an analytical engagement with urban regeneration and the implications of liberal time to marginalized spaces worldwide. My grounded research on indigenous and marginalized geographies unveils the way global urban theories and practices conceal colonial-power relations, while disregarding grounded knowledge. Hence my studies aim to contribute to the production of a “rooted” knowledge. My research has been published in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Time & Society, and GeoJournal, among others.