Critical Urbanisms

Shourideh C. Molavi is a writer and scholar in specializing in critical state theory, decolonization, migration and border studies, and decolonial ecologies, and trained with a background in International Humanitarian Law. She has over 15 years of academic and fieldwork experience in the Middle East—focusing on Israel/Palestine—on the topics of border practices, citizsenship and statelessness, militarized landscapes, and human and minority rights, with an emphasis on the relationship between the law, violence and power.

Shourideh studied Political Science at the University of Toronto (B.A. 2008) and completed her graduate studies at York University in Canada (M.A. 2010; PhD 2018). She has taught on the above topics in liberal-arts schools across the Middle East region, including at Bard College in Al-Quds University in Palestine (2013-2015), at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar (2016-2018), and at the American University in Cairo, Egypt (2018-2020).

Since 2014, she has worked as a Lead Researcher on Israel-Palestine and fieldworker with Forensic Architecture, an interdisciplinary research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. The spatial analyses and human-rights oriented investigations on the Middle East that Shourideh oversees at Forensic Architecture examine how mapping and visualization of physical environments undergoing political violence may enhance the data and scholarship produced—and complement the anti-oppression struggles of communities.

Her publications include Stateless Citizenship: The Palestinian-Arab Citizens of Israel (Brill, 2013); Contemporary Israel/Palestine (Oxford University Press, 2018); Environmental Warfare in Gaza: Contemporary Practices of Israeli Settler-Colonialism (Pluto Press, 2022 forthcoming); and Interrogating the Citizen: The Israeli Logic of Colonial Exclusion and Global Citizenship Restrictions (I.B. Tauris, 2022 forthcoming). Shourideh’s past and ongoing investigations with Forensic Architecture can be found here.