Witnessing Erasure: Diasporic Memory and the Algerian Struggle Against French National Amnesia

The concept of diaspora, often entangled within the nation-state\u27s rigid boundaries, presents a crucial yet often overlooked lens to denaturalise ossified narratives associated with the linear progression towards the centralised ‘neutral’ state. In crossing borders and boundaries, the Algerian diaspora in France occupies a liminal space that continuously reimagines, challenges and deterritorialises notions of ethnicity, citizenship and belonging. Pierre Nora’s seminal work ‘Lieux de Mémoire’ provides an important theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between locations, events and symbols as central to the collective memory of the nation. It is notable that he, being a member of the French settler community in Algeria, was deeply entwined with the history of French colonial rule. However, Nora’s works often anchor themselves in a collective memory that has sanitised the traces of empire as if deemed unworthy of remembrance or simply considered marginal. Whilst Nora’s works are central to the field of memory studies, his perspective risks perpetuating a vision of France that obscures the foundational violence of its colonial enterprise and the enduring liminality of its post-colonial subjects. Although post-colonial perspectives have gained traction within and amongst French academic circles, they often challenge key aspects of French national character. The relegation, erasure and essentialization of ‘non-European’ history are not merely semantic, but emblematic of institutionalised reductionism and dismissal. Ideas of progress and modernity are presented as inherent and universalistic. I propose this constitutes a dual process of historical erasure, firstly the erasure and essentialization of ‘non-European’ history and secondly the erasure of the memory of the atrocities committed during French colonial rule. This dynamic ultimately affirms the positional superiority of France through disseminating a worldview that privileges Western epistemologies. This dual process of erasure is particularly pronounced when understanding the experiences of the Algerian diaspora whose presence actively challenges the memories and imaginaries of French colonial rule and modern claim of neutrality. The Algerian diaspora dispels the myth of a static, territorially bound nation-state by merely existing within French borders. The post-memories and mythification of Algeria in the consciousness of second and third-generation Algerians challenge the assimilationist policies of the French state whilst unsettling what ‘home’ means for these communities.  Thus, diasporic memories are a form of resistance, recasting the past in a light that illuminates the pluralistic and often contentious nature of identity and belonging

The Lost Paradise: The Role of the Witness in Shaping the Historiography of Jerusalem

Jerusalem is not merely occupied; it is actively rewritten. This piece examines how Palestinian witness testimony defies the gradual violence of erasure, transforming the city from a site of dispossession into an assertion of historical continuity. Drawing from decolonial theory, phenomenology, and political philosophy, I argue that testimony is not merely an act of remembrance but an epistemic and ontological intervention that challenges both material oppression and the state’s monopolization of historical truth. I interrogate the material conditions of occupation, positioning them within a broader philosophy of spatial domination: the destruction of Palestinian homes, the calculated deprivation of infrastructure, and the juridical apparatus that renders Palestinian existence precarious. Drawing on Nur-eldeen Masalha’s concept of memoricide, I examine how settler-colonial power operates not just through territorial expansion but through the systematic erasure and reconstruction of historical narratives, turning Jerusalem into a battleground of meaning as much as land. Testimony emerges here not as passive recollection but as an act of existential resistance. The act of witnessing asserts both the primacy of lived experience and the refusal of epistemic erasure, positioning Palestinian memory as a challenge to the structures that seek to render it illegible. Judith Butler’s work on ‘grievability’ is mobilized to interrogate how international frameworks of recognition operate to exclude Palestinian suffering from the category of the politically visible. Further on, I situates testimony within digital landscapes, analyzing the El-Kurd family’s plight in Sheikh Jarrah as an extension of what James C. Scott terms ‘hidden transcripts,’ a counter-history that bypasses the gatekeepers of official discourse. ‘Digital sumud’ is introduced as a contemporary iteration of Palestinian endurance, where social media functions not just as documentation but as a subversion of hegemonic narratives. Ultimately, this essay argues that Palestinian testimony does more than document loss. It disrupts, resists, and reclaims. The struggle over Jerusalem is not just territorial; it is a war over meaning itself, and through the voices of those who refuse to be erased, the city remains a living archive of defiance

Resisting Surveillance: Can Abolitionist Self-Care Truly Provide Liberation from the Male Gaze Within Oppressive Structures??

This paper explores the pervasive nature of the male gaze within patriarchal structures, claiming that women and other marginalised groups are subject to constant surveillance. This leads to the internalisation of the male gaze, which effectively creates women to become their own witnesses in response to societal expectations. By building on Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze, the paper applies this theory to social dynamics beyond the original cinematic context. It applies theories of alienation to argue that the male gaze functions as a form of estrangement for those living within systematised oppression. The paper examines how different intersectional identities-such as women of colour and queer individuals- experience its effects in distinct ways. These experiences diverge significantly from those of cisgender, heterosexual women, highlighting the complex intersections of identity within patriarchal systems. The paper makes a clear point that defiance does not erase the gaze but affirms its power as something that must be resisted. Once you become aware of its presence, it cannot simply be forgotten. The author concludes the paper in an optimistic tone, suggesting that abolitionist self-care practices can provide individuals with radical tools to dismantle oppressive structures. Abolitionist self care in isolation finds it difficult to challenge the male gaze, however, activist spaces offers a beacon of hope as means for women to resist the male gaze through mutual recognition and meaningful, interpersonal relationships

An Analysis of the Restricted Euler Problem Using Symplectic Integrators

The Three-Body Problem is far from fully solved despite centuries of effort. The restricted Euler Problem is a special case in which two bodies are fixed in place, resulting in two Poisson-commuting conserved quantities, allowing the system to be fully integrable by the Liouville-Arnold theorem. We analysed the restricted Euler problem using an order-4 symplectic integrator, which conserves the Hamiltonian. We used this integrator to simulate the restricted Euler problem and recovered known orbits from the literature

Parameterized Post-Friedmann Formalism for the Dark Scattering Model

Recent results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument find a preference for dynamical dark energy. This motivates improving the accuracy of predictions for dynamical dark energy models, including those which can resolve current tensions in the data, such as the dark scattering model. We improve the parameterized post-Friedmann approach for this model, reducing the error from approximately 1.3% to only 0.1%. Additionally, we show that the commonly used scale-independent approximation may not be completely accurate and, when applying the best-fit values from DESI on the dark scattering model, we predict an enhancement of the power spectrum at late times, worsening the S8 tension

Unravelling the Invisible Spatial Logic: Spatial Production of the Clothing Wholesale Service Area in the Liuhua District in Guangzhou, China

This article focuses on an unplanned clothing wholesale district in Guangzhou City, China. Dramatic Chinese Economic Transition and the district’s advantageous location next to the Guangzhou Railway Station have led to its commercial success. Smaller clusters of clothing wholesale buildings, clothes processing shops, shop design companies, tag shops, mannequin shops and logistics companies constitute this district. This research aims to understand how these smaller clusters choose their locations in the district without holistic urban planning in advance. By following the Actor-Network Theory, this research regards spaces as actors among other human and non-human actors and adopts a bottom-up perspective to investigate the spatial structures of the district. Qualitative methods including observation, semi-structured interviews and mapping are used. This research has found that invisible spatial logics behind the physical structures have induced the formation of the district, businesspeoples’ location choices and their spatial appropriations. This research goes beyond the visible forms and shapes to investigate the urban dynamics and complexities. It offers new perspectives to understand the spatial structures of urban spaces from the perspectives of space end-users

Living Networks: re-imagining regional communities and their heritage

Working from the periphery on Djaara Country, Castlemaine Regional Victoria,140km out of Melbourne, our proposal starts from the centre of this old gold mining town and seeks to document and capture our more-than-architectural endeavour. For this narrative, the architect’s business is as much about observing and taking note, revealing and paying heed to the invisible and often intangible systems of just what’s there now. Drawing from a Kraussian expanded architectural field, we have evolved a design process of building site knowledge and context that uncovers the histories, peripheral stories, forgotten memories and patterns of occupation. In seeking solutions to accommodate a growing community, to house those now homeless and to give more agency to our Indigenous people, we reflect on currently accepted design strategies and propose an alternative model that rethinks property boundaries and ownership, occupancy and vacancy regulations.  Our work has been resisting the additions of new buildings and instead foregrounds what already exists, to recast the accumulations of built fabric and of its interstitial landscapes as inherently value filled. In doing this we reveal an eclectic town fabric, a mix of industrial, Victorian and 20th century material that holds traces of past occupation but also reflects a kind of vibrant eclecticism that speaks more to a possible future than carbon-hungry developer-led solutions. Our essay will build an alternative spatial narrative that makes visible a process that tracks and traces the voices of those invisible and marginalized protagonists as well as the value of existing built fabric. What we aim to construct is not more built stuff, but a more robust future that accepts what is already there; the ordinary, the unremarkable as well as remarkable. Our conclusions and contributions are as much in spatialising and making active – sensible – those forgotten and intangible voices and peripheral built heritages

Dematerializing Riegl’s Modern Cult of Monuments

This paper delves into the transformation of memory and heritage in the digital age, interpreting Alois Riegl’s pivotal 1903 work, “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” through the lens of today’s digital technologies. Riegl’s axiological examination, foundational in the field of heritage preservation, is reevaluated to explore how digital documentation reinterprets historical and age values of monuments, aligning with his philosophy of ‘touchless’ preservation. This research proposes a novel paradigm for representing and engaging with monuments within the digital sphere that I term “Cult Beyond the Digital.” Furthermore, the paper argues for the contemporary relevance of Riegl’s methodologies in architecture, particularly those linked to non-contact recording methods that result in the creation of intangible heritage. The paper speculates on future preservation strategies, especially as emerging AI technologies promise the potential to reconstruct missing historical data and enhance monument preservation efforts. By examining the interaction between technological advancements and monument preservation, the study revisits and expands Riegl’s theory, offering a forward-looking perspective on the discipline in the digital and beyond the digital era, aligning with the theme “Beyond the Visible” by exploring how architectural processes such as aging are documented by contemporary digital tools to protect our heritage and memory. This invisible force of time leaves architecture with traces that can be seen as a continuous “unmaking” or dematerializing of its physical forms. The age value of monuments was considered the monument’s most essential value of the twentieth century, according to Riegl. Extending his theory to our time, the age value is surpassed by what I call a “timeless” value that represents digitally documented monuments over time. They, as digital data, shift their properties from the material world to the digital realm. By doing so, the main protagonist of this architectural “unmaking” is not an architect but the environment itself.&nbsp

“I Ran to the Comments”: Social Media Culture, Hate-Speech, and Hyperreality

While social media has allowed our world to become more interconnected and informed on global issues than ever. It has also aroused much criticism in the way it facilitates unrestricted hate-speech and violent rhetoric, especially towards historically oppressed groups. While the abundance of hate-speech online may be credited to the facelessness facilitated by internet profiles that negates accountability, this essay argues that there is a more cognitive and deeper explanation for how people are able to engage so violently with one another online. It will explain this through the framework of Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation”, elaborating that this discourse on social media exists within a hyperreality in which people are trained to jump to comment in a discriminatory way as soon as they witness the existence of a represents historical traits of otherness. The essay situates this idea of otherness in literature concerning the social architecture of gender, race and sexuality. Due to this process of reproduction of information, people are able to comment so aggressively as they are not witnessing another human being but instead, through the hyperreality they are only witnessing an image of a historically category of other, and thus they do not authentically engage with what they see but instead play into the simulation

The Women as witness to desire: Power lines and structures in Lanval by Marie de France.: Exploring the structural importance of women in narratives of the Medieval court as expressed in Marie de France’s Lanval

This article interrogates the role of women in Marie de France’s Lanval by examining how female figures function as symbolic witnesses and repositories of desire within the feudal court. Drawing on theoretical frameworks advanced by Julia Kristeva, the study argues that medieval literature constructs women as the Other, whose absence of personhood provides a space for the projection of male desire, lending itself to the pursuit of honour and spiritual ascendance. Through a detailed analysis of the dual portrayals of the fairy queen and the feudal queen, the article demonstrates how these figures, though superficially subversive, ultimately reinforce the gendered hierarchies of courtly love. The narrative techniques employed in Lanval—from lexical choices and character juxtapositions to the symbolic settings of the forest and court—reveal a deep reliance on the female form to validate the male quest for refinement and societal worth. By contrasting the two characters, the article underscores how women are reduced to ‘objects of exchange’, serving primarily to witness and substantiate male progress (Kristeva, 1981, p. 50). In doing so, it highlights the inherent tension between the subversive potential of Lanval and its structural adherence to patriarchal values, offering insight into the complex interplay of desire, power, and gender in medieval narratives.