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Scientific article | Green Knowledge Community, Beats for Gaza

CEI researcher Ana Margarida Esteves just published the article ““Green Knowledge Community, Beats for Gaza”: Transnational linkages and institutional obstacles to the diffusion of arts and permaculture-based resilience knowledge among youth in Gaza” with co-author Majed Abusalama.

This article offers insights on how the institutional and material limitations, posed by the Israeli/Egyptian blockage on Gaza, promote learning processes that impact the strategic choices of an activist collective. It uses ethnographic data to explore micro processes of reasoning and decision-making in “Green Knowledge Community, Beats for Gaza”, a network of Palestinian and international group of young activists aiming to promote grassroots-level resilience to Israeli occupation in this Palestinian territory. It analyses the shift from an initial focus on building an arts therapy school, which turned out to be unfeasible due to limitations both of the ground and among potential international donors, to a focus on permaculture, regarded as a strategy that could circumvent those limitations by mobilizing endogenous resources. The collective became progressively aware of the need to direct transnational knowledge diffusion to the support of the struggle for food sovereignty and grassroots economic self-determination through the localizing of agricultural production. This was due to the circumstances of the Israeli military occupation, Israeli/Egyptian blockage and the inclusion of a significant amount of arable land in the Gaza/Israel buffer, as well as to strategic choices of international donors, as well as the Hamas government.

The article was published on Vol. 37 of the international peer-reviewed journal Bethlehem University Journal, dedicated to the topic of Youth Engagement: From National Communities to Transnational Linkages.

Photo by Andisheh A on Unsplash

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Ana Margarida Esteves

Ana Margarida Esteves is a Research Fellow at the Center for International Studies of the University Institute of Lisbon, Iscte and Guest Assistant Professor of the Department of Political Economy of the same institution. She has a Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University (Providence, RI, USA) where she was a Fulbright Fellow. Her research and teaching encompass the relations between the social and solidarity economy, the commons and the sustainability transition movements; synergies between nature, culture and technology; and the application of critical pedagogies, as well as strategies of non-formal education, to social mobilization and the promotion of participatory democracy. She is a founder and member of the International Editorial Committee of the journal "Interface: A journal for and about social movements" (www.interfacejournal.net). She is also a member the RC47: Social Classes and Social Movements of ISA - International Sociological Association and part of its editorial platform Open Movements / Open Democracy (https://www.opendemocracy.net/openmovements ). In 2020, Ana Margarida became a member of SEADS (Space Ecologies Art and Design), a transdisciplinary and cross-cultural collective of artists, scientists, engineers and activists that is actively engaged in deconstructing dominant paradigms about the future and develops alternative models through a combination of critical inquiry and hands-on experimentation.". Previous to joining CEI-IUL, Ana Margarida Esteves held teaching positions at Brown University, Universidade Federal Fluminense (Brazil), Tulane University (New Orleans, USA) and Sunway University (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia). She is a Visiting Research Fellow at Université Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium) and Scuola Normale Superiore (Florence, Italy).