Homeland: a Virtual Series Exploring Radical Belonging with Miknaf Ha'aretz & Friends

Homeland: a Virtual Series Exploring Radical Belonging with Miknaf Ha'aretz & Friends

Thursdays, February 13th, 20th, 27th, March 6th & Tuesday March 11th
7:30-9:00pm GMT (2:30pm-4:00pm ET / 11:30am-1:00pm PT) 
Recordings sent to participants after each session

In times of increasing nationalism, fascism & border violence, how do we cultivate liberatory relationships with land in ways that heal, nourish, repair and transform us all? Learning from those on the front-lines of the violence of empire protecting their lands and culture from erasure, assimilation & theft, join us for our latest virtual series exploring the possibilities of finding homeland, healing and liberation beyond nationalism and nation-states.

Join us with some very special guests in February & March to cultivate more understanding, community and solidarity around these issues.

These sessions will be held by co-founders of Miknaf Ha'aretz Sara Moon and Samson Hart who will be joined by guest presenters. 

Miknaf Ha'aretz is building earth-based, radical-diasporist, jewish community in the UK & organising for land justice for all.
Learn more: @miknafhaaretz and www.miknafhaaretz.co.uk

These sessions are open to everybody. Whilst there are some sessions that might speak to Jewish themes around belonging, the series is aimed at a broad audience and we will be covering many aspects and examples of land justice, homeland and belonging. You do not have to be Jewish to attend, and no prior knowledge will be assumed.

You can join for the whole series or for individual sessions and all sessions will be recorded and sent out to participants after each session. You can find more information about individual sessions below.

Sessions

Session 1: Thursday 13th February. The Land in Our Bones* with Mariam Mohamed & Tasha Elena Stevens-Vallecillo
Wherever we go, the medicinal power of plants & fungi is at our sides, abundant and generous. For diasporic peoples, relationship with ancestral plants can be a source of deep healing and connection. In this session we will be exploring plant connection as antidote to empire and powerful affirmation of belonging.

*The title of this session is taken from the wonderful book of this name by Layla K.Feghali.

Session 2: Thursday 20th February. We all belong here: Fighting for Migrant Justice in the UK (with Mona Bani & Abel, a young advocate from Revoke).
In times of increasing displacement through climate breakdown, war, violence and increasing fascism and state instability, how do we build structures to support migrants to find belonging and home in new lands? In this session we will be learning from Mona Bani, founder and director of Revoke, a grassroots organisation advocating for young displaced young people, care-leavers, and those affected by the criminal justice system, living without advocates, families, power, or a voice. 

Session 3: Thursday 27th February. Seeding Reparations: Land as a site of repair (with Andre Kpodonu, Seeding Reparations)
Britain had a foundational role in the colonisation, displacement and genocide of millions of people across the world, as well as the formation of our current neo-colonial capitalist economic system. In this session we will be joined by Andre Kpodonu from Seeding Reparations to ask how land based reparations might support the repair, healing, belonging and sovereignty for many people in the UK affected by the legacies of British colonialism.

Session 4: Thursday 6th March. Farming on the frontlines: Stories from Gaza (with Muna Dajani & George McAllister)
For the last 15 months, Gaza has faced an unprecedented assault on all aspects of life and infrastructure. In this session we will learn more of the scale of this destruction in Gaza, while exploring stories of steadfastness that continue to endure as people continue to tend their homeland and produce food in the midst of genocide. 

Session 5: Tuesday 11th March - Building a Museum of Enclosure (with the MoE Collective based at House of Annetta)
In our last session of the series, we introduce the Museum of Enclosure, a new political education project focused on histories of dispossession and resistance. The central role of England in the origins of racial capitalism and colonialism makes memories of commoners and ongoing enclosures crucial for today’s internationalist land justice struggles. The collective will share their visions and work so far, inviting us to help shape the Museum in its early stages.

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Speaker Bios

More coming soon.

Tasha Elena Stevens-Vallecillo had a dual Heritage from both Nicaragua in Latin America and England. Her insights into small scale, peasant and indigenous culture have greatly informed her approach to land, food and medicine and the call to serve the sacredness of all life. She founded Land, Food and Medicine at 42 Acres in 2024 where she has been for seven years. As the daughter of parents who had to flee war Tasha found belonging in Nature after feeling completely alien with her values, culture and ways of feeling the world growing up in a council area in London. These senses and knowings are things she is giving language to now, through rediscovering herself and wisdom through spiritual land based practice. Tasha is an outdoor mushroom farmer growing using ancient techniques originally from Asia, she is a medicinal crop grower using wild tending techniques and a community bridge builder, activator and most importantly mother.

Mariam Mohamed (she/her) is a community herbalist, medical herbalist trainee, grower and mother who lives in Totnes, South Devon. She was born and raised in London and her ancestral roots lie in the Horn of Africa. She stewards a community herb garden based at School Farm, Dartington. She is founder and director of Radical Plant Folk C.I.C, an accessible community growing project that supports community sharing on plant knowledge and cultural heritage. Alongside running folk herbalism workshops, she organises wellbeing spaces in nature for black, mixed heritage and people of colour, often exploring themes around identity, belonging and healing with the land. Her work centers around land justice, belonging in the countryside, decolonisation and reclaiming relationship with land.

Mona Bani is the founder of Revoke, a grassroots organisation working with young displaced people in London, and co-founder of the award winning media platform Untelevised, which documents grassroots work, to explore possibilities for social change. Here she produced the podcast series 'Land for Who?', in partnership with NEF and Shared Assets. For her migration work she's been selected as a Clore Lived Experience Leader in the Migration sector, a Thirty Percy Changemaker, an advisor to the GLA Migration Team, and she appears regularly on international media, including the BBC, LBC and Moviestar+, speaking against the hostile environment. Her own parents were political refugees from Iran, and she grew up in Denmark before migrating to the UK as a teenager.

Abel left Eritrea as a teenager and sought asylum in the UK as an unaccompanied minor, where he entered the care system. He's since advocated for himself to be accepted into Goldsmiths University, with refugee status, and has worked with Revoke since its inception, supporting other young people with Tigrinya translation and representing Revoke at events. He started an ecological traineeship with Bethnal Green Nature Reserve in 2022, as part of a partnership between them and Revoke, where he learnt to cultivate medicinal mushrooms and hold space for others wanting to connect to nature in the city. Since then, he's become a part time site manager there, supporting Tower Hamlets residents to access the space, and feel part of a community there.

Andre Kpodonu is Director of Programmes - Food Justice at Feedback and a member of Seeding Reparations. Through talks, workshops, gatherings and partnerships, Seeding Reparations works to reframe food system transformation through the lens of Reparations. Through historicising the emergence of corporate Agri-industry, the initiative works to make clear that a just transformation of our food system must be underpinned by a wholistic reparative framework, or risk simply fuelling the next iteration of colonial plunder. Andre’s perspective is shaped lastingly by over 15 years of youth work in London and with young leaders across Europe. He is also a Trustee of the Anne Matthews Trust, a charity based in Corris, Gwynedd, Cymru that works so support people from refugee and migrant backgrounds grappling with the countries continuing hostile environment.

George McAllister is part of the scholar-activist collective AgroecologyNow! as a political agroecologist. She specialises in food and farming in conflict-affected and disaster-prone environments. In recent years, she’s been part of a team from Gaza and the UK doing action research on Gaza’s foodways to strengthen food sovereignty at the urban and territorial levels.

Muna Dajani is an action researcher with a background in critical political ecology. Her work aims to understand environmental and water governance through decolonial and critical lenses. Her research focuses on examining community struggles for rights to water and land in settler colonial contexts in Palestine and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, with special attention to farming practices, infrastructural politics and identity formation.

The Museum of Enclosure sprouted in 2024, but its roots have been nurtured by generations of storytelling and resistance to dispossession across borders. These particular commoners met while organising Perpetual Stew, an annual week of programming around land justice and folk knowledge at the House of Annetta in 2023. This was followed by a second stew in 2024, where the first contributions to the Museum were exhibited. In between, the collective has performed memory work, standing in solidarity with Palestinians and nomadic communities on these Isles; offering workshops on queer ecologies and belonging; facilitating an action-reading group and printing zines; and trespassing the land. MOE dreams of a bus and a boat to make space for belonging, despite Britain’s high concentration of rural and urban land ownership. It is open to all, and welcomes your contributions, now and in the future.

Ticket Info

Per session: £7.50 (Limited) / £10 / £15 / £20
All sessions: £37 (Limited) / £50 / £75 / £100

These sessions are ticketed so we can properly support our amazing array of speakers (and keep building the jewish diasporist world to come!). Please be generous if you can and please keep the supported rate for those who really need it. If none of these options work for you, please get in touch for a cheaper or free ticket at: hello@miknafhaaretz.co.uk

If you'd like to join live - you'll need to have purchased a ticket by 6pm on the day of the session in order to receive the link on time. If you sign up for 'all sessions' once the series has begun you will still receive recordings of all sessions.

Session Format

We aim to make these sessions as accessible as possible. The sessions themselves will be very informal. Samson Hart and Sara Moon will introduce the sessions, offer some brief framing and then they will mostly be offered in a webinar style with the participants muted until question time at the end. You will be invited to participate with video on or off and we will take a short ‘bio’ break half-way through the session. All sessions will offer closed captioning and will be recorded for later viewing or re-watch.

If there’s anything else we can do to support your access, presence and comfort at these sessions please let us know at hello@miknafhaaretz.co.uk.

With deep gratitude to Miranda Cohen for the beautiful art work...
Website: mcohendesign.com
Instagram: @mirandacohenmakes