Lina El-Hawat

Preserves Palestinian women's narratives through the Women's Memory Camp, empowering marginalized voices

Lina El-Hawat's Memory Revolution

Lina El-Hawat, a Palestinian anthropologist, revolutionized oral history documentation through her Women's Memory Camp initiative. Since 2018, this project has collected over 800 testimonies from Palestinian women across Gaza, West Bank and diaspora communities. By training local women as oral historians, Lina created a decentralized network preserving stories often excluded from official histories.

The camp's innovative 'memory kits' - containing recorders, cameras and guided journals - empower participants to document their own experiences. This approach won the 2022 UNESCO Memory of the World Award. In 2021, Lina partnered with Stanford University to create an open-access digital archive, making 400+ stories available to researchers globally.

Her 2023 exhibition 'Voices from the Olive Groves' at the British Museum showcased 70 oral histories through multimedia installations. This work directly influenced the 2024 UN Women report on Palestinian women's resilience strategies. Lina's methodology is now adopted in Syrian refugee communities and Indigenous groups in Argentina.

In 2025, her TED Talk 'The Power of Unheard Voices' reached 1.5M viewers. By prioritizing women's narratives, Lina's work challenges historical erasure and builds intergenerational knowledge networks. Her initiative proves that grassroots documentation can transform collective memory and inform policy-making.