Settler Time, Ruined Space: Tracing Colonial Temporalities in Jaffa

This talk examines how ruination and demolition have become enduring features of Palestinian urban life, shaping distinct temporal experiences and modes of existence. Focusing on the Palestinian city of Jaffa under Israeli rule, it discusses how prolonged processes of dispossession and displacement generate layered temporalities that intertwine material destruction with lived time. The analysis traces how Israeli planning and governance impose temporal frameworks on Jaffa’s neighborhoods—rendering them “empty,” “frozen,” or “ahistorical” spaces— as well as the Palestinians’ temporal experiences of waiting, endurance, and the struggle to reclaim control over time. By situating Jaffa’s ruins within broader discussions on settler colonialism and temporality, the talk addresses the persistence of frontiering as a continuing colonial logic—one that endures through different actors, spatial forms, and infrastructures, including within territories that have already been subjected to settler-colonial domination.

Yara Sa’di-Ibraheem is a postdoctoral fellow at U of T's Hearing Palestine. She specialises in political geography, with research interests that include indigenous geographies and temporalities, settler colonialism, neoliberal urbanism, and infrastructure, focusing on the Middle East, particularly Palestine. Her main research explores socio-political dimensions of infrastructure in colonial settings— principally telecommunications and playgrounds—as well as neoliberal planning under settler colonialism and the spatial-temporal experiences of indigenous communities.