Wednesday 18 November 2026, 2:00–4:00 pm
Garwood Lecture Theatre, UCL
Curated by Ashish Ghadiali. Presented in partnership by Radical Ecology and UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation (SPRC).
About the programme
Join Mahmoud Alshaer for an intimate, participatory session combining readings from I Am Still Alive: Dispatches from Gaza and A Year on the Abyss of Genocide with responsive writing and conversation.
The session explores writing as a daily tool of survival, an affirmation of life, an act of healing and a form of cultural resistance under extreme state violence. It considers the temporal and geographic distance between living under bombardment and listening from London.
What does it mean to encounter words written under siege while ordinary life continues around us? How can attention to lived detail challenge the abstractions of headlines and statistics? And how might listening become an active practice of witnessing and solidarity?
Participants will respond from their own position as listeners and witnesses, without attempting to simulate an experience they have not lived.
Programme
2:00–2:30 pm | Arrival
2:30–2:40 pm | Welcome and introduction
An introduction to the session and its exploration of writing, survival and the responsibilities of witnessing.
2:40–3:05 pm | Part 1: The Reading
Alshaer will read selected passages from both books that capture the granular, daily labour of staying human: navigating displacement, preserving communal life and experiencing time under siege.
As you listen, you are invited to notice a striking phrase, image or concrete sensory detail to take into the writing exercise.
3:05–3:25 pm | Part 2: Responsive Exercise — “Marginalia of the Witness”
Using your chosen detail as a starting point, you will write a short reflective text through three lenses:
(1) Temporal Dissonance: Reflect on simultaneity: the rhythm of an ordinary day in London alongside the compressed, precarious time of survival in Gaza when these lines were written.
(2) Dismantling Abstraction: Examine how intimate, lived detail challenges the sanitised, statistical language of mainstream media and breaking news.
(3) Active Witnessing and Counter-Memory: Formulate an intentional written response that resists collective forgetting and turns listening from passive consumption into an act of ethical solidarity.
3:25–3:55 pm | Part 3: Open Reading and Dialogue
Participants will have the opportunity to share brief reflections from their writing, followed by an open discussion with Alshaer.
Together, we will explore the role of literature as a counter-archive, mourning beyond colonial frameworks and the work of building genuine solidarity.
3:55–4:00 pm | Closing reflections
About the participants
Mahmoud Alshaer is a Palestinian writer, poet and cultural curator from Rafah, Gaza. He co-founded the independent literary and cultural platform 28 Magazine and led Gallery 28, a space for literature, exhibitions, performances and community life in Rafah. His books include I Am Still Alive: Dispatches from Gaza and A Year on the Abyss of Genocide. He is also a laureate of Pause, financed by the Nomis Foubdation and hosted by the Chair of Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies at the College de France. His writing records daily life under bombardment, bearing witness to violence while affirming the persistence of memory, relationship and cultural life.
Ashish Ghadiali is an artist-researcher, filmmaker and curator, and co-founder and director of Radical Ecology. His practice spans film, writing, performance and sound, alongside the development of networks and spaces for collective learning. His recent films include On Synchronicity (2026), Dream Ecologies (2026), Invasion Ecology (2024) and Planetary Imagination (2023). His work brings artistic, political and ecological inquiry into conversation.
About Radical Ecology
Radical Ecology is an experimental studio based in Dartington, South Devon. Its work brings artistic, political and ecological inquiry into shared practice, creating spaces in which different ways of knowing, imagining and living together can be tested.
Drawing on Félix Guattari’s understanding of environmental, social and mental ecologies as inseparable, the studio develops durational projects, collective research and public programmes concerned with the conditions of life in a time of climate breakdown.
About UCL SPRC
The UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation explores the impact of racism across scientific, cultural and intellectual life. It brings together scholarship, teaching and public engagement to examine racial inequality and hierarchy, producing historically informed critical knowledge addressed to urgent social and political questions.