From 18 to 22 May 2026, Dr. Muna Dajani and Hanna Al-Taher visited the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group 'Renewable Energies, Renewed Authoritarianisms? The Political Economy of Solar Energy in the MENA' at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute in Freiburg.
Dr. Muna Dajani is a political ecologist, scholar-activist and fellow at the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics (LSE). She is committed to struggles for environmental justice and decolonization in Palestine and the wider SWANA region. At the heart of her research are the lived experiences of those resisting dispossession and ecological violence, and her scholarship amplifies grassroots knowledges to challenge dominant paradigms of sustainability and development.
Hanna Al-Taher is a research associate at the Chair of Political Theory and the History of Political Thought at TU Dresden as well as an affiliated researcher at the University of Kassel and Queen Mary University London. Her research focuses include political theory, anticolonial research, borders, critical geography, Queer of Color critique and gender studies.
During their visit, Muna Dajani, Hanna Al-Taher and the Emmy Noether Team worked on a joint publication project on "Geographies of Energy Imperialism". At its core lies the interplay between climate change and new forms of destruction and resistance in West Asia and North Africa. The project thereby contributes to current debates on energy imperialism in the region.