Subverting Digital Colonialism: Palestinian Internet Cultures and Practices

About Subverting Digital Colonialism: Palestinian Internet Cultures and Practices pre- and post-Oct. 7

Following Gazan fighters’ incursion into Israeli-controlled lands in October 2023, Israel severed Palestinian communication networks as a precursor to its ground operations. Airstrikes targeting telecommunications infrastructure triggered network outages. The Israeli attack on Palestinian information and communications technology must be understood as a tactic of terror that facilitates the enclaving and genocide of the Palestinian population, with each network blackout preceding or accompanying an intensification of violence against Gaza’s residents. Network interruptions serve two purposes: severing Gaza from the outside world and severing Palestinians within Gaza from each other. The Israeli military uses severance to enact genocidal practices on the Strip with impunity. However, these tactics of severance are not new to the post-Oct. 7 moment: Israel has historically leveraged an array of strategies in its efforts to prevent the coalescing of a Palestinian national movement for sovereignty, from restricting infrastructural development to engaging in hasbara campaigns of disinformation.

This talk presents Palestinian practices of world-making that mitigate, overcome, and operate beyond severance. Palestinians engage in collaborative, cross-generational, and subversive community-building practices—oral history archives, digital mapping communities, video games, and virtual reality tours—to formulate resistance and life despite the conditions of control imposed by Israel.

About Meryem Kamil

Meryem Kamil is an assistant professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on digital technologies and new media in the context of Palestine. She is a co-author of Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths Press, 2020), which advances a new analytic to account for the increasing conditions of economic, social, and political vulnerability in the digital age. Kamil’s writings have also appeared in the journal Social Text and in the edited anthology Media Travels: Toward an Atlas of Global Media (Amherst College Press, 2025).

About Design and Politics in Transition

Who should design serve? How does design work in a crisis, and also recognizing that some people have been living in crisis for hundreds of years? And how might we reimagine design as a radical discipline for dialogue and action? From reinterpreting legal histories and theories that enable the design of place, to redesigning food distribution systems around food and land justice, to transforming what it means to be family, design offers many ways to transform our relationships with ourselves, each other and our environment. Design and Politics in Transition offers inspiration, theory, and guidance on a variety of design practices and epistemologies that together help us transition toward different, more equitable worlds where all can thrive–even during historical moments of political and social strife.

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If you are experiencing any COVID-like symptoms the day of the event, please join us remotely.

Host or Publisher UC San Diego Design Lab