On September 25, 2025, John Cabot University welcomed Professor T. J. Demos for a talk titled “Gaza’s Genocide, Ecocide, Technolibertarian Warfare, and the Seeds of Survival.” The event kicked off the Fall 2025 edition of Digital Delights and Disturbances (DDD), a series organized and sponsored by JCU’s Communication and Media Studies Department. T. J. Demos is an esteemed scholar and founding Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In his opening lecture, he explored the consequences of Israel’s use of technolibertarian warfare in Gaza.
Throughout the event, Demos discussed the artwork of Palestinian artist Vivien Sansour, whose botanical interventions cultivate space for Palestinian endurance and solidarity.
The lecture was introduced by Professor Peter Sarram, who said: “I first came across Demos’ work at a very important moment, when I was trying to understand how green media education was actually a process of decolonizing media literacy. His crucial books demonstrate how we cannot think about environmentalism or ecology without engaging eco justice and decolonial struggles.”
T. J. Demos
Professor Antonio Lopez added: “What distinguishes Demos’ work is not only that he tunes into the very people that are the ‘antenna’ of our age – artists who are the pirate radio of emerging futures. T. J. demos is also a tuning fork that taps into the global resonances that are reshaping the world.”
Palestine As a Warning for a Destructive Future
T. J. Demos started his lecture by quoting Gustavo Petro, president of Colombia, in his speech at COP28 in Dubai. Petro warned that what the world is witnessing in Gaza is “a rehearsal of the future,” a future “that awaits those displaced by the climate crisis in the Global South.”
Demos correlates the destruction that Israel is laying on Palestine to the environmental crisis we are subject to. He explained how Israel treats Gaza as “a testing ground,” where the military can try out their weapons. “Israel emerges as a global paradigm,” as “a new model of alliance with capitalists and nationalists who embrace Netanyahu’s Israel as prototype of an illiberal, post-democratic West.” In fact, as Demos pointed out, many U.S. corporations enable and profit from the Israeli campaign in Gaza. “This enables a technolibertarian billionaire class to drive Israel’s war machine,” said Demos.
Vivien Sansour: Art as a Form of Resistance
Demos presented the art of Vivien Sansour as a testament to Palestinians’ resistance and defiance of Israel’s genocidal and ecocidal destruction. He projected a picture taken in Gaza, displaying a Palestinian child’s hand emerging from the rubble of a bombed building, from which a flower seed is – incredibly – growing. Sansour is known for the Palestinian heirloom seed library, which has been an on-going project since 2014: she collects traditional native seeds that grow in Palestine, such as akub and zaatar, key staples of the Palestinian diet that have been threatened under Israeli settlers’ chemical agriculture and colonialism. She then distributes and shares these plants to farmers in the West Bank and to international organizations all over the world.
“Her art directly challenges settler-colonial domination,” said Demos. “As a form of survival media, Sansour’s ‘seeds of futurity’ defy the technolibertarian, eliminationist order that aims to erase Palestinian existence.” Art like Sansour’s represents powerful acts of resistance. “These acts insist that even in the face of destruction, solidarity and sustenance endure as powerful forms of defiance,” said Demos. “They enable the oppressed, in this case, Palestinians, to reclaim agency through embodied collective practices of healing and resistance, to decolonize the imagination – to refuse to die.”
