Shourideh C. Molavi is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Human Rights at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.
Shourideh is a writer and scholar specializing in critical state theory, decolonization, migration and border studies, decolonial ecologies, and trained with a background in International Humanitarian Law. She has over 20 years of academic and fieldwork experience in the Middle East—focusing on Israel/Palestine—on the topics of border practices, citizenship and statelessness, militarized landscapes, and human and minority rights, with an emphasis on the relationship between the law, violence, and power.
Shourideh studied Political Science at the University of Toronto (B.A. 2008) and completed her graduate studies at York University in Canada (M.A. 2010; Ph.D. 2018). She has taught on the above topics in liberal arts schools across the Middle East and North Africa, including at Bard College in Al-Quds University in Jerusalem (2013-2015), at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Qatar (2016-2018), at the American University in Cairo, Egypt (2018-2020), and most recently at the University of Basel (2020-2023).
Since 2014, she has worked as the dedicated researcher on Palestine/Israel and fieldworker for Forensic Architecture, an interdisciplinary research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. The spatial analyses and human rights-oriented investigations on Palestine that Shourideh oversees at Forensic Architecture examine how mapping and visualization of physical environments undergoing political violence may enhance the data and scholarship produced—and complement liberation and anti-oppression struggles.
Her publications include
Stateless Citizenship: The Palestinian-Arab Citizens of Israel (Brill, 2013);
Contemporary Israel/Palestine (Oxford University Press, 2018);
Environmental Warfare in Gaza: Colonial Violence and New Landscapes of Resistance (Pluto Press, 2024);
Constituting the Jewish State: The Israeli Logic of Colonial Inclusion Restrictions (I.B. Tauris, 2026 forthcoming), and
Human Rights Against Palestine: Counter-Forensics and the Treachery of Images (Verso Books, 2026 forthcoming). Shourideh’s past and ongoing investigations with Forensic Architecture can be found
here.
