Nawal is an Assistant Professor of Media and Communications in the School of Culture, Media, and Society at the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) in Abbotsford, British Columbia.
She was previously the Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Justice and Decolonization with Transforming Inquiry into Learning and Teaching (TILT) and a Term Lecturer in the School of Communication, both at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.
Her book, Reconciling the Holocaust and the Nakba Through Photograph-based Storytelling: Willing the Impossible (2023, Palgrave Macmillan),* explores how contending master narratives and collective memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba, which have created and continue to sustain the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, can be challenged, complicated, and disrupted when Palestinians and Israelis story and exchange their own counter-narratives and counter-memories of these tragedies through vernacular photographs. To facilitate this process she developed a unique photograph-based storytelling method, which enabled Palestinians and Israelis to first narrate and then exchange stories of how the Holocaust and/or the Nakba have impacted their lives. As this study demonstrates, storytelling and photography enable the occasions and conditions of possibility necessary for Palestinians and Israelis to connect rather than compare their histories of suffering and exile, take moral, ethical, and political responsibility for one another, and imagine a new form of cohabitation grounded in justice and equitable rights for all.
Nawal's other publications include Comics Images and the Art of Witnessing: A Visual Analysis of Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (ASJ 2019), From Palestine to the Canadian Diaspora: The Multiple Social Biographies of the Musleh Family's Photographic Archive (MJCC 2015), and Negotiating Palestine Through the Familial Gaze: A Photographic (Post)memory Project (TOPIA 2012).* She holds a MA in modern Middle Eastern history and is a former member of the Board of Directors for Peace It Together, a Vancouver based organization that brought together Palestinian and Israeli youth from overseas to build and promote peace through joint dialogue, filmmaking, and community engagement.
*Click on publication titles to learn more and/or download.