Dr. Yara Sa’di Ibraheem
Areas of specialization:
Neoliberal Urban planning, Displacement, Temporal-spatial experiences, Infrastructure in contested areas.
Areas of competence:
Comparative urbanism, Neoliberalism, Colonial planning legacies, Urban governmentality, Indigenous geographies.
Dr. Yara Sa’di-Ibraheem is a geographer interested in indigenous geographies and time, settler colonialism, neoliberal urbanism, and infrastructure within colonial contexts, focusing on telecommunications and playgrounds.
She earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Geography and Human Environment at Tel Aviv University in 2021. Her thesis focused on neoliberal planning within contested spaces, employing a micro-geography perspective. Following her graduation, she held two postdoctoral positions. The first was at the Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script” at Freie Universität Berlin, where she delved into comparative urbanism and displacement. The second postdoc at the Digital Lab for Landscape History in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion in Haifa, where she focused on telecommunication infrastructure development in Palestine/Israel over the last century.
As part of her Polonsky Fellowship, Dr. Sa’di-Ibraheem intends to continue her research on telecommunication infrastructure and its intricate impact on communities and landscapes.
Sa’di-Ibraheem’s research was published in several leading journals, including Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Time & Society and Urban Planning. Moreover, she co-edited (with Khaled Furani) the book “Inside the Leviathan: Palestinian Experiences in Israeli Universities” (Arabic), published by Van Leer Institute Press and Dar Lila.
Publications:
Sa’di-Ibraheem, Y. & Wilkof S. (2025). Cabling and Un-cabling Palestine/Israel: Toward a Theory of Cumulative Infrastructural Injustice. Political Geography.
Sa’di-Ibraheem, Y. (2023). Jaffa amid Theoretical Transformations: Demolition as a Research Prism. Jerusalem Quarterly, 93, 88-99.
Sa’di-Ibraheem, Y. & Furani, K. (2022). Inside the Leviathan: Palestinian Experiences in Israeli Universities. Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute Press and Dar Lila (Arabic).
Sa’di-Ibraheem, Y., & Fenster, T. (2022). Settler-colonial dispossession in West Jerusalem: between the personal and the collective. Settler Colonial Studies, 13(2), 159-173.
Sa’di-Ibraheem, Y. (2022). Settler Colonial Temporalities, Ruinations and Neoliberal Urban Renewal The case of Suknet Al-Huresh in Jaffa. GeoJournal. 87, 661–675.
Desille, A., & Sa’di-Ibraheem, Y. (principal author) (2021). ‘It’s a Matter of Life or Death’: Jewish Migration and Dispossession of Palestinians in Acre. Urban Planning, 6(2), 32-42.
Sa’di-Ibraheem, Y. (2021). Privatizing the production of settler colonial landscapes: ‘Authenticity’ and imaginative geography in Wadi Al-Salib, Haifa. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 39(4), 686-704.
Sa’di-Ibraheem, Y. (2021). Indigenous Wanderers in a Fortress Campus: Spatial Experiences of Palestinian Students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Holy Land and Palestine Studies. 20(2), 123-145.
Sa’di-Ibraheem, Y. (2020). Jaffa’s times: Temporalities of dispossession and the advent of natives’ reclaimed time. Time & Society, 29(2), 340-361.