Staff profile

Silvia is currently a Career Development Fellow in Human Geography at Durham University. Prior to this, she was a teaching fellow at Durham University (2023/24) and an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Aberystwyth University (2022/23).

Silvia's research interrogates the production of knowledge in relation to settler colonialism and environmental politics. Her recent work explores Palestinian cultural activism and ecological practices in the West Bank, focusing on the museum and the botanical garden as sites of struggle.

Silvia has a Master's degree in Globalisation and Development Studies (Maastricht University, the Netherlands) and a PhD in human geography (Aberystwyth University). Her research has been funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Royal Geographical Society with IBG (through the prestigious Frederick Soddy Postgraduate Award), the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data (WISERD). 

Current PhD Supervisions

Naznin Nasir, PhD Student in the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience

• (i) Critical approaches to the study of nationalism and national identity, with particular focus on the role of museums and archives in the articulation of national identities.
• (ii) Cultural and artistic approaches to geopolitics, the production of imaginative geographies through creative practices, including exhibitions and visual culture.
• (iii) Postcolonial and decolonial critiques to geographical knowledge, colonialism and settler colonialism - with a focus on colonial constructions of nature and environmental politics in Palestine-Israel.

Book review

• Hassouna, S. (2017). Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, 2015, When Humans Become Migrants: Study of the European Court of Human Rights with an Inter-American Counterpoint Autori. Antropologia, 4(1), https://doi.org/10.14672/ada20171190%2525p

Journal Article

• Hassouna, S. (2023). Cultivating biodiverse futures at the (postcolonial) botanical garden. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 49(2), https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12639
• Hassouna, S. (2021). Inhabiting the Space Between Search and Research. Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences, 2(2), 297-315. https://doi.org/10.1163/25903276-bja10030
• Hassouna, S. (2016). Spaces for Dialogue in a Segregated Landscape: A Study on the Current Joint Efforts for Peace in the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict. Conflict Resolution Quarterly, 34(1), 57-82. https://doi.org/10.1002/crq.21169