The Separation Barrier Graffiti Corpus

Between 2004 and 2017, I documented graffiti and mural art along the Israeli Separation Barrier, producing a corpus of over 6,000 photographs concentrated primarily in Bethlehem and ar-Ram. The corpus is organized around three analytical axes: authorship (who is writing on the wall and why), content and themes (what is being said and how it changes over time), and audience (who the writing is for and whether that audience is present). The corpus is multilingual — English, Arabic, Hebrew, and several other languages — and captures the full range of expression on the Barrier’s surface, from political sloganeering to internationally recognized public art. Active digitization and ingestion work is ongoing.

Browse the archive: Graffiti in Palestine: A Visual Archive, 2005–2011

Related StoryMap: Four Months After Santa’s Ghetto

Geospatial Analysis of Contested Space

Maps are not neutral records. They encode political claims, naturalize boundaries, and make the contingent appear inevitable. My geospatial research examines how space is defined, claimed, and contested — tracing the gap between official geographic frameworks and the lived realities they obscure. Projects span the definitional instability of regional geographic terms across historical periods, the spatial dynamics of community expansion and contraction in contested urban environments, and the deviation between the Israeli Separation Barrier’s official routing and its construction on the ground. Across all of this work, the analytical question is the same: what does the map argue, who benefits from that argument, and what does it make invisible?

Expert Analysis and Consultation

I am available for expert analysis, consultation, and testimony in matters involving geospatial conflict analysis, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the political dimensions of cultural heritage. Previous engagements include expert witness work for the ACLU of Washington State. Inquiries via the contact page.

Current and Forthcoming Work

Writing appears at A Longer View on a regular cadence — fieldwork-based analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, published since 2025. Several pieces are currently under review at external venues, with work submitted to outlets focused on the Middle East, political geography, and the politics of place. Longer analytical work is in development across multiple registers, from journal articles to a book-length argument about structural invisibility and the architecture of understanding in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Active fieldwork focuses on two connected questions: how navigation applications encode the occupation spatially and render its mechanisms invisible to users outside the conflict, and how community boundaries within the Old City of Jerusalem expand, contract, and press against one another over time.