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Shalat Wi-Hattat: Dabke, Relationality and Palestinian Worldmaking Under Deracination
by
Mon, Nov 9, 2026
1 PM – 2 PM (GMT+2)
Room PO71, Alwaleed Hall
AUC Avenue, P.O. Box 74, New Cairo, 11835, Egypt
Details
Join us for Qahwa & Kalam, co-organized with the Department of Sociology, Egyptology and Anthropology, for a talk by Lucy El-Sherif ’97, assistant professor of social justice education at the University of Toronto.
Dabke is Palestinian world-making through practice. It pushes back against deracination, the attempt to sever the relational world of Palestinian life, which is centered on Palestinian land. Drawing on ethnography with dabke performers and an analysis of the Palestinian folk song “Shalat,” El-Sherif unpacks the relational world that dabke makes possible, one in which Palestinians’ relationships with each other emanate from their relationship with land.
The talk shows how dabke thickens the relations with Palestine that deracination thins, how it creates openings of inshirah [reprieve] within the hamm [psychic burden] of occupation, and how it offers a relational infrastructure for land-based sociality among Palestinians to grow. Spatially translocal, socially communal and temporally recursive, dabke fosters these encounters through repeated practice, despite attempted deracination.
Speakers
Lucy El-Sherif
Assistant Professor in Social Justice Education
University of Toronto
Lucy El-Sherif is an Assistant Professor in Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. Her work examines how cultural practices shape forms of social and political existence when formal political power is constrained. She asks what it means to dance a relationship to one stolen land, Palestine, while living on another stolen land, Haudenosaunee territory.
Her book manuscript, Dabke on Turtle Island, examines how Arab racialization is lived and negotiated through embodied cultural practice, tracing how dance sustains transnational peoplehood while reshaping forms of citizenship, belonging, and collective life across Palestinian and Arab communities in Canada.