Stitching Gaza: Counter-Mapping, Spatial Justice and Writing Under Ruins PhD

Hala Alnaji [PhD year 7, part time]

Supervisors: Nasser Golzari, Samir Pandya & Yara Sharif

This thesis examines Gaza as a lived spatial condition shaped by siege, occupation, displacement, surveillance and recurring destruction. An environment seeped in mourning, for a place and those touched by it. 

Moving beyond political narratives, humanitarian statistics and conflict imagery, the thesis investigates how power, resistance, memory and survival are embedded in both visible and invisible dimensions of space. Drawing on theories of spatial justice and critical mapping, it develops ‘the unseen’ as a framework for exploring atmosphere, verticality, ethereality, borderscapes, rhythm, mobility and sensory experience.

The research initially employs counter-mapping to reveal hidden structures of spatial injustice across Gaza’s sky, tunnels, soundscapes, borders, darkness, and everyday practices. However, the large-scale destruction following October 2023 exposed the limits of mapping a city undergoing continuous transformation and erasure. In response, the thesis shifts toward mapping diaries, fragmented and textile cartographies, and collective stitching. Mourning becomes a methodological condition, while stitching emerges as an embodied spatial practice for holding memory, fragmentation, displacement, and belonging beyond the representational limits of conventional maps.

KEY WORDS: stitching; mourning; counter-mapping; spatial justice