Mourning as Praxis: Catastrophe, Knowledge, and the Refusal of Closure

This contribution is submitted to The studio of the extra-territorial, in collaboration with the American University in Cairo, to be presented as part of the Specters of the Undercommons (Inhumanities in the Wake of the Catastrophe) Conference , 12 & 13 April 2026.

Mourning as Praxis: Catastrophe, Knowledge, and the Refusal of Closure
Hala Eid Alnaji

Abstract:
This contribution reflects on the transformation of an architectural PhD into what I describe as a thesis in mourning, written under conditions where its subject — Gaza — is undergoing active annihilation. Rather than treating catastrophe as a past event to be analysed from a distance, the research unfolds from within an ongoing rupture, where the stability required for conventional academic methods collapses. Maps drawn earlier in the research no longer correspond to the city they sought to describe; names, borders, and spatial categories become provisional, erased, or obsolete faster than they can be documented.
Confronted with this condition, the dissertation abandons linear argumentation and representational mapping, reorganising itself instead through layers of mourning. Mourning here is not approached as an emotional aftermath but as a methodological condition — a way of thinking, mapping, and making when the ground of research is continuously undone. Architectural drawing gives way to stitching; cartographic overview to proximity, repetition, and touch. Fabric emerges not as metaphor but as method: a material practice capable of holding rupture, fragility, and continuity without claiming repair or closure.
Through individual mapping diaries and stitched cartographies, mourning becomes a spatial practice that resists the institutional demand for coherence, resolution, and distance. These practices do not seek to restore Gaza or stabilise its form; they insist on staying with what is damaged, incomplete, and disappearing. In doing so, the research refuses the epistemic violence embedded in colonial cartographic logics that render catastrophe legible only through abstraction and scale.
By framing mourning as an architectural and epistemological praxis, this paper contributes to broader debates within the humanities on witnessing, knowledge production, and ethics under conditions of ongoing violence. It proposes mourning not as a retreat from knowledge, but as a necessary method for thinking, making, and remaining in relation when catastrophe does not end.