Book Launch: Olive Growing in Palestine

Olive Growing in Palestine: Stories of Everyday Resistance follows the lives of four families and dozens of individuals in the West Bank who grow olives as both livelihood and resistance.

In this new book, Palestinian researcher Juman Simaan provides a counterpoint to eurocentric studies of daily lives and labour, foregrounding Global South perspectives on how people and communities respond to adversity and oppression.

This groundbreaking work sheds light on the indigenous Palestinian concepts of Sutra, ‘Awna and Sumud, and the ways in which these shape how olive farmers resist in everyday ways in concert with each other, with international supporters, and with the more-than-human world, against the forces that seek to divorce them from their land and their trees. These grassroots Palestinian ways of doing, being and becoming give communities, activists, and scholars new tools to counter global forces of discrimination, imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy and the human-made climate crisis.

Our Speaker:

Juman Simaan is a Palestinian who lives in Glasgow. He is an Associate Professor of occupational therapy at Edinburgh Napier University. Juman is interested in understanding the everyday lives and daily resistance of Global South communities, and people who are marginalised by structural forces such as the nation state, capitalism, racism and trans-homoPhobia.

A special guest, Vivien Sansour, the founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library (PHSL), will be joining the event online to speak about the current daily situation of farmers in the West Bank of Palestine and the work of the PHSL.