Hadeel Assali is an anthropologist and former engineer whose work looks at the ongoing colonial legacies of the discipline of geology as well as anti-colonial ways of knowing and relating to the earth in southern Palestine. She received her PhD in Anthropology in 2021 from Columbia University, where her research looked specifically at the development of geology in Britain and how it was exported to the colonies for extraction, mapping, and eventual state-making technologies. More broadly, she examines the narratives deployed to produce space(s) and how they become imbued with the authority to do so. She is currently a lecturer and postdoctoral fellow at Columbia where she and her students are exploring ways of decolonizing the earth sciences. She is also a filmmaker and writer whose work draws heavily from her family stories based in Gaza, Palestine.