About me
Danna Masad is an architect and doctoral researcher at Tampere University, working on the Dwelling with Crisis: Home at Spaces of Chronic Violence (HOMCRI) project. Before joining the HOMCRI team, Danna co-founded ShamsArd Design Studio in Ramallah, where she served as principal architect and taught architecture and design at Birzeit University for several years. An active member of her community, she has also served on the board of notable Palestinian institutions, including the Khalil Al-Sakakini Cultural Center, Birzeit University’s Institute for Women’s Studies, and Sakiya: Art, Science, and Agriculture. Danna is also a founding and board member of initiatives such as Sharaka: Community Supported Agriculture and Al-Ouna: Autonomous Resourcing for Palestine.
At Tampere University, her research examines herding as a practice of home-making and un-making in the occupied West Bank, bridging political geography, political ecology, landscape studies, Indigenous studies, and settler-colonial studies. Danna is also actively involved in the Palestine Research Group, the Geographies of Coloniality and Everyday Violence Group (GoCEP), and the Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG) at Tampere University.
Research fields
Political geography, political ecology, Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, landscape studies, architecture
Selected publications
Masad, D. & Dajani, M. (2024) “ʼinjaṣa Cisterns as Vessels of Knowledge: How Palestinian Traditional Building Knowledge Endures” in Arab Modern: Architecture and the Project of Independence, edited by Nadi Abusaada and Wesam Al Asali. Zurich: gta Verlag,
Dader, K., Ghantous, W., Masad, D., Joronen, M., Kallio, K. P., Riding, J., & Vainikka, J. (2024). Topologies of scholasticide in Gaza: education in spaces of elimination. Fennia - International Journal of Geography, 202(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.147002