For thousands of years, the natural landscape in Palestine was a terrain of enchantment, collectively safeguarded by human and non-human alike. The natural water source - spring, well, stream – was such a terrain, a spirited site, inhabited by spirits, good and bad, and by the spirit of tales and their tellers. Knowledge of a water source’s spiritedness and custodianship was conveyed through folk tales, which also defined community, traced legacy and honoured debt.

Moving through time and territory, the practice-led research focuses on water-lore through imagination, continuity and collaborative long-term processes and entanglements. The research will overview the political, cultural, enchanted, and endangered landscape of Palestine, as recounted through personal, biographical, and intimate connections with waters and those that spirit them. Yet, it is not the purpose of the research to exhaust political narratives, which are readily available elsewhere. At its core, Inhabited springs takes long walks through valleys in search of water stories with friends who resist spirit erasures.

My practice-led doctoral research will create conditions for connectedness with water through memory-mapping and water mapping, by regenerating a practice of collective imagining, walking, divining, collecting, telling, and making. Inhabited springs, divided homeland will depend on collaborative and creative workshop methodologies, and will work with spoken-word performance, among other materials. The research will unfold as a substantial body of work with a unique contribution to knowledge, hospicing story-entanglements and water reclamations in and beyond Palestine.

Instagram: @jumanasan

Supervisors

Primary supervisor: Dryden Goodwin
Secondary supervisors: Sharon Morris, Larne Abse Gogarty, Brighid Lowe