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About
Islam al Khatib is a PhD student in Social Research Methods, supervised by Professsor Flora Cornish and Dr Sara Salem.
Islam is a Palestinian refugee born and raised in Lebanon; she grounds her work in anti-colonial knowledge production and the political stakes of methodology. Her project traces how knowledge is produced from and about Palestinians in Lebanon, extending outward to the wider country and region, and explores the counter-practices of research that emerge under conditions of war and surveillance.
Beyond her PhD, Islam’s research interrogates the geopolitics of technology by examining how surveillance systems and militarized AI function as reinforcing projects of imperialism.
She is currently a Mapping Connections Fellow (2025-2026), where she traces how China’s AI and technology industrial policies are being co-shaped across the Arab region. Through supply-chain mapping, policy analysis, and interviews, she examines how cloud infrastructures, manufacturing zones, and regional tech investments are redrawing geopolitical alignments and rewriting industrial policy from the ground up. Islam is also a Fellow at 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media (2025 - March 2026). Her research investigates how surveillance technologies move through global tech supply chains as “public safety” or “cybersecurity” solutions and exported into global governance systems.
Expertise
resistances, knowledge building infrastructures, epistemological decolonization, critical theory* (with a focus on cybertheory*), feminisms, and fascisms.