Speaker: Dr. Muna Dajani, LSE Fellow in Environment
Hosted by: CCJ Executive Committee Member Mohammed Rafi Arefin and CCJ Faculty Affiliate Brenna Bhandar
Dr. Muna Dajani is an action researcher with a background in critical political ecology. Her work aims to understand environmental and water governance through decolonial and critical lenses. She holds a PhD from the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics (LSE). Her doctoral research focused on examining community struggles for rights to water and land resources in settler colonial contexts in Palestine and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, with special attention to how farming practices acquire political subjectivity.
Dajani is currently a Fellow in Environment at the Geography and Environment Department at LSE. Previously, she held the position of Senior Research Associate at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University where she worked on enhancing joint learning on the project entitled, “Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability”, which explored promising grassroots initiatives of holistic groundwater governance, shedding light on traditional and intergenerational skills and knowledge(s). Her work at the University of East Anglia’s Water Security Research Centre (2016-2021) focused on their Upper Jordan and Yarmouk Hydropolitical Baseline reports, both exploring highly contested and politicised transboundary river basins. Her work helped unpack the complexities of water governance and development in contexts of climate uncertainty and rising political insecurity.
Dajani is the lead editor of The Untold Story of the Golan Heights (I.B. Tauris, 2021), which resulted from her co-development and management of a collaboration project entitled Mapping Memories of Resistance between the LSE Middle East Centre, Birzeit University and Golan Heights based Al-Marsad, alongside online curriculum in Arabic and English teaching about the Golan Heights. Dajani has published papers in Political Geography, Antipode, Environment and Planning E and Water Alternatives. She also led publications of non-academic books such as “The Ethical Guide to Consumerism in Palestine” (2015 and 2021), policy briefs on water and climate change politics (Al-Shabaka Palestinian Policy Network, Jadaliyya, Minority Rights Group), in addition to speaking about issues of environment, climate advocacy and decolonising universities on several campuses and institutions in the UK.
