Country of Origin:
Palestine/Israel
WLS Award:
2008-2009
About:
Graduate Program: Master’s program in Non-Governmental Organizations and Development at the London School of Economics, UK
Background & Goals: Lana Tatour works in the field of human rights, development, community empowerment, peace building and Palestinian-Israeli dialogue. She worked for more than a decade in a number of human rights and peace-building NGOs in Israel/Palestine including the Legal Center for Freedom of Movement (Gisha) as an Information Officer and Project Manager advocating for the rights of Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip though research, training and outreach. She is also the Co-Founder of the Committee Against House Demolitions, a grassroots advocacy group for the protection of the local Arab community from house demolitions and evacuation orders.
Through her thesis, Tatour analyzed the socio-political reality of NGO politics in order to articulate viable and beneficial strategies for more effective social and political transformation. After her studies, she hoped to return to Israel to bridge the gap between NGOs and local political groups to maximize their knowledge and enhance their capacity to promote their collective agenda.
Post-Degree Projects: Tatour is a Fellow at the Australian Human Rights Centre and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia, in the School of Social Sciences. She wrote her PhD in Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick (UK). Her thesis ‘Domination and Resistance in Liberal Settler Colonialism: Palestinians in Israel between the Homeland and the Transnational’, theorises the racialised, ethnicised, gendered and sexed dimensions of subordination and resistance of native/indigenous populations as shaped through the intersection of the liberal settler state, as both inclusionary and exclusionary, and the liberal politics of human rights, as a vehicle of both empowerment and domination. She has taught at the University of Westminster, University of Warwick and University of New South Wales.
