Mobile Methodology: Mapping Entrepreneur Abeer Abu Ghaith’s Repertoires of Resistance in the Palestinian Startup Ecosystem

Abstract

In technical and professional communication (TPC) there have been calls to locate the field in transnational contexts. Aligned with the social justice turn in TPC is an emergent body of critical and decolonial scholarship attending to power, privilege, and positionality. The following study extends this scholarship through attention to these issues in an emergent startup ecosystem in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). Grounded in mobility studies, this telling case attends to the strategic manner in which a female entrepreneur navigates this system through a process of networking, or knotworking, as she navigates both patriarchal and colonial systems of oppression. Central to this process is the complex way she mobilizes a multimodal and spatial repertoire—conceptualized as repertoires of resistance. These moves shape not only the ways that she traverses the social, semiotic, and geographic landscape, but also the shifting nature of the landscape itself. Methodologically such moves entail a conceptual shift from a focus on activity systems to mobility systems.

Keywords

activity theory actor-network theory workplace writing and literacy qualitative research methods transnational entrepreneurship

Introduction

In technical and professional communication (TPC) there have been calls to locate the field in transnational contexts (Fraiberg, 2021; Sun, 2020). Aligned with the social justice turn in TPC (Walton et al., 2019) is an emergent body of critical and decolonial scholarship (Agboka, 2014; Agboka & Dorpenyo, 2022; Baniya, 2024; Ding & Savage, 2013; Haas, 2012; Williams & Pimentel, 2014) attending to power, privilege, and positionality. In the following study, we extend this scholarship through attention to these issues in an emergent startup ecosystem in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). Grounded in mobility studies, the analysis focuses on female entrepreneur Abeer Abu Ghaith as a key actor embedded in this system. As a Palestinian Bedouin raised in a refugee camp who established her reputation as Palestine’s first high-tech female entrepreneur, her story surfaces the links among literacy, space, and mobility. Core to these intersections is the complex way she mobilizes a multimodal and spatial repertoire of resources through a process of networking, or knotworking (Prior & Shipka, 2003), as she traverses the local landscape. Conceptualized as repertoires of resistance (Johansson & Vinthagen, 2015), this process is deeply bound up in the changing nature of the landscape itself. Indeed the landscape in the oPt has been profoundly transformed in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, attacks in southern Israel and the war in Gaza that followed. Focused on ways these events intersect with Abeer’s trajectory, the analysis raises challenging and densely knotted issues related to the study of literacy and mobility in unsettling, unstable, colonial, authoritarian contexts increasingly part of a shifting world (dis)order.

To accomplish these aims, we build on activity theory as a key theoretical and methodological framework within writing and workplace studies. Over the past 3 decades, third-generation activity theory (3GAT) (Bazerman & Russell, 2003; Russell, 1997; Spinuzzi, 2004, 2008) has been used to study object-oriented activity for tracing the development of written texts and UX designs. However, a core critique is that it presupposes a bounded approach to communities and organizations. This has resulted in a shift toward a less-bounded fourth generation of activity theory (4GAT) (Spinuzzi & Guile, 2019) to study “all-edge adhocracies” or new workplace structures that rapidly link actors across boundaries, combine into work groups with teams of specialists, swarm projects, and disperse at completion (Spinuzzi, 2011, 2015, 2025). Core to this form of work is its deeply distributed, dynamic nature as actors coordinate activity across digital and face-to-face contexts, such as on laptops, phones, and coworking spaces. Foregrounding the complexities of these relationally networked forms of activity, 4GAT analyses focus primarily on identifying contradictions and breakdowns in the system with the aim of designing workplace interventions. More limited attention, however, has been given to uncovering how such issues are linked not only to the production of knowledge but also to the production of identity, power relations, and social space. As Spinuzzi (2008) has articulated, AT does not “scale up well to study broader social phenomenon” (p. 42) with a “political edge” (Sun, 2020, as cited in Spinuzzi, 2023, p. 38).

One powerful extension of this framework is a shift from activity systems to mobility systems (Fraiberg, 2021; Fraiberg et al., 2017; Nordquist, 2017). This term borrows core tenets of an activity system framework, while drawing on spatial theory/social geography, transnationalism, and mobility studies to examine how local literacy and design practices shape and are shaped by social structures. This mobile methodology focuses on the spaces and forces mediating the politics of mobility (Cresswell, 2010): who/what moves, when, how far, how fast, and to what effect. To look more closely at these effects, our focus on Palestinian society is particularly relevant as a situation in which actors’ ability to move is sharply constrained.

Palestinian Ecosystem

Central to the reconstruction of the 21st-century economic and geographic landscape are global startup ecosystems comprised of a web of startups, accelerators, venture capitalists, coworking spaces, incubators, meetups, and conferences. Manifestations of modern flexible capitalism, these structures are rapidly transforming literacies, identities, mobilities, and geographies. Part of a wider transnational social field (Levitt & Schiller, 2004), these systems mediate how actors move, and live out their lives, across local, regional, and national boundaries. A focus on the Palestinian ecosystem is a particularly telling site for uncovering the underlying links between literacy and relational networks of power in a highly contested space where mobility is sharply restricted.

The Palestinian ecosystem itself is a complex network extending across the borders of the West Bank and Gaza. As a pillar of the Palestinian economy, the tech ecosystem serves as a gateway to a global marketplace and offers employment for thousands of skilled professionals (Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2023; World Bank, 2024), while offering hope of building an independent Palestinian economy and future state. However, despite its resilience, this ecosystem is hampered by significant infrastructural challenges due to occupation (Bjørn & Boulus-Rødje, 2018): electricity shortages, lack of high-speed internet and electronic payment systems, limited office space, restrictions on imports/exports, and travel bans.

The oPt is divided into two discrete regions with 5.5 million inhabitants under Israeli military control (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 2024). The West Bank has roughly 3.4 million inhabitants. Occupied after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel gradually built up 147 settlements with more than 500,000 settlers (European External Action Service, 2025), checkpoints, fences and border walls, a two-tiered road system, identity cards, and an array of rules and regulations that restrict Palestinian mobility. Intended to discipline the movements of the Palestinian people, this regime of mobility (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013) has fragmented and balkanized the region while constraining Palestinians’ ability to travel beyond the narrow confines of their cities and villages.

Gaza is subject to even stricter policies of containment as a narrow strip of land completely sealed off with only two points of transit. As one of the most densely populated regions in the world with 2.1 million Palestinians (Noori Farzan et al., 2021), this narrow strip of land measures 41 kilometers long and 12 kilometers at its widest. Confined to this area, Palestinians often describe it as an “open-air prison.” These conditions have led to one of the highest unemployment rates globally, making the digital economy both a necessary lifeline and a site of profound struggle.

Further complicating this deeply knotted landscape, the colonial structures of the occupation are entangled with patriarchal systems embedded within Palestinian society (Althalathini & Tlaiss, 2023). Palestinian women often have fewer social and legal protections (Baldi, 2018). These constraints are coupled with the expectation that men participate in the public sphere through salaried work, “while women are confined to the private sphere and expected to be responsible for child-rearing and domestic affairs” (UN Women, 2018, p. 15). However, it is important to recognize that considerable variation in gender norms exists across areas of the oPt, with distinctions between the cosmopolitan center of Ramallah and more traditional Palestinian cities and villages. Moreover, high unemployment rates resulting from occupation have contributed to the disruption of traditional gender roles as women are forced to enter the workforce to support families. Additionally, a growing university-educated class of women is finding opportunities in the high-tech sector (Althalathini, 2024). Despite such shifts, this population continues to encounter persistent discrimination, which, similar to STEM and high-tech fields globally, remains heavily male dominated. As a result, Palestinian women must navigate “double oppression” as they negotiate reinforcing patriarchal and colonial structures.

As researchers in this area, we are tasked with solving the puzzle of how to capture strategic ways actors navigate these entanglements. To study this process, we turn to the case of Abeer Abu Ghaith for addressing the following questions.

■ First, in her capacity as a Palestinian female entrepreneur and tech-worker, how does Abeer negotiate interlocking systems of oppression, including patriarchal and militarized regimes (i.e., living under occupation), and what is the role of literacy/rhetoric in this process?

■ Second, how does this process mediate Abeer’s social, professional, and geographic trajectories?

■ Third, how does this process not only shape how she navigates the social and geographic landscape, but also the changing nature of the landscape itself?

■ Fourth, how can such study inform our theoretical and methodological frameworks in rhetoric, composition, and TPC?

Theoretical Framework

This tracing of the situated literacy practices of female entrepreneur Abeer Abu Ghaith is grounded in transnational feminist approaches (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994) for unmasking how social and historical forces have produced “scattered hegemonies.” The term signals the scattered nature of global inequities and power structures that are “manifested in complex, diverse, dispersed, changing, and sometimes confusing or complementary ways” (Enns et al., 2021, pp. 15–16). These uneven processes are further linked to the construction of intersectional identities (Crenshaw, 1993) and to circuits of activity that form complex networks. Together these comprise a transnational social field (Levitt & Schiller, 2004) mediating flows of literacies, ideologies, capital, and objects across boundaries.

Attending to ways our focal participant positions herself in translocal spaces, this framework examines the links between literacy practices and the politics of mobility (Cresswell, 2010). This framework foregrounds how everyday activities mediate who/what moves, how far, how fast, and to what effect. Studying these effects entails a shift from linguistic repertoires to multimodal and spatial ones (Fraiberg, 2010, 2018; Pennycook & Otsuji, 2014). This analytic optic foregrounds how actors mobilize a repertoire of resources as they navigate the social, institutional, semiotic, and geographic landscape. In relation to Palestinian society, these constellations of resources are conceptualized as repertoires of resistance (Johansson & Vinthagen, 2015). Grounded in this conceptual framework, innovation systems operate as “mobility systems” affording the movement of some actors while constraining others. As part of a dynamic process, actors’ movements across these systems are linked to the changing nature of the systems themselves.

To understand the ways that literacy is bound up in this process, we turn to the concept of literate activity (Prior, 1998). This analytic lens entails a shift from narrow, bounded acts of literacy toward a conceptualization of literacy as an ongoing practice linked to the negotiation of multiple and interlocking streams of activity: that is, fleeting moments of inscription involve the confluence of dispersed and “fluid chains of places, times, people, and artifacts that come to be tied together” (Prior & Shipka, 2003, p. 182). As embodied ways of knowing and being in the world, literate activity is about how actors come to “inhabit made worlds” (Prior & Shipka, 2003, p. 182) and constantly (re)make them.

To attend to this interplay, we extend the 4GAT concept of knotworking (Engeström, 2008; Fraiberg, 2010; Prior & Shipka, 2003): the tying and untying of signs, symbols, actors, and objects. This process is part of an ongoing negotiation, or struggle, as actors weave and are woven into social systems. These dialogic exchanges mediate the fluid and fuzzy networks shaping the coordination of activity, the positioning of the participants, the flows of actors and objects across borders, and the shifting nature of the borders themselves. Challenging bounded notions of space as a backdrop or stage against which activity takes place, space here is understood as entangled, deeply knotted streams of literate activity. Massey (2005) characterizes these interwoven strands as “throwntogetherness”: forces, positions, ideologies, uncertainties, tensions, complexities, and ambiguities of social and political life. The following analysis attends to how actors are complexly positioned within these tangled networks, or knotworks, as they shape and are shaped by everyday practices. This analytic optic foregrounds how the mobility system is “enacted, maintained, extended, and transformed” (Spinuzzi, 2008, p. 16).

Mobile Methodology

Tracing Abeer Abu Ghaith’s mobilities, the unit of analysis for studying this process is mediated action (Wertsch, 1991). Mediated action is grounded in the idea that individual actors cannot be understood apart from their tools-in-use. This includes both material (laptops, phones, desks, chairs) and symbolic tools (languages, texts) sedimented with ideologies and orientations shaping and shaped by everyday practices as an ongoing struggle. Central to this struggle are moments of uptake, or “translation” (Latour, 2007), as texts, tools, actors, and objects are appropriated, resisted, and transformed. This process entails friction or unequal encounters across difference. Tsing (2005) argues these unequal encounters can lead to new forms of culture, power, and agency.

One heuristic for studying this struggle is posing the question, Who is carrying out the action? (Latour, 2007; Prior & Hengst, 2010; Wertsch, 1997). The answer is always at least two actors. Engaged in a process of translation, the key is to identify who/what is doing the translating and who/what is being translated. Methodologically, this activity entails identifying moments of translation across space-time through three fundamental moves (Latour, 2007; Prior, 2008): localizing the global, redistributing the local, and connecting sites.

Localizing the Global

The first move is to localize the global. This focus is grounded in flat ontology’s basic principle of “following the actor” to ensure every link is visible in complex interlocking sets of associations. Keeping this principle in mind, it is key to chart transnational flows of people, objects, and imaginaries in motion as they are translated, or recontextualized, across space and time. For instance, studying the design of a global startup’s pitch deck, one might trace how a meeting in Arabic is translated into written notes (in a mixture of Arabic and English), taken up into PowerPoint slides (in English), and delivered at a European high-tech conference (in English).

Redistributing the Local

The second move is redistributing the local to show how single sites are relationally linked or folded into other times and spaces. For example, studying Abeer’s workplace literacy practices on a laptop in her backyard, one might trace how she forms ties with programmers in Gaza and a tech startup in Silicon Valley. The aim is to map out the texts, tools, actors, and objects coordinating activity.

Connecting Sites

This third move is to identify connections among the different sites. Returning to the examples aforementioned, one might study how Abeer further weaves, or knots, together relationships with Palestinian coworkers in Gaza, the Silicon Valley startup, and colleagues at the European conference. Mapping out this relational interplay, the objective is to identify key moments, spaces, and literacies mediating the positioning of the actors and the circulation (translation) of signs, symbols, actors, and objects across these borders. This strategic step ties together interlocking mobility systems. Ultimately, bounding the case depends on the object of analysis (policies, texts, companies, identities) with decisions based on the significance of the actor’s influence in shaping the object (Spinuzzi, 2011).

The aim of these methodological moves is to make visible extended chains of actors without jumping, breaking, or tearing. While researchers ultimately may be forced to make a “jump,” working towards this ideal encourages them to offer a fuller account. Ultimately, bounding the case depends on the object of analysis (e.g., identities, policies, documents, startups). Decisions about what data to incorporate into the analysis are based on the rhetorical force or pull of the actor’s influence in shaping the object (Spinuzzi, 2011).

This tracing of activity is accomplished through drawing on a range of data (IRB approval granted), including a semi-structured interview in which Abeer narrated her own social and professional history. Designed to open up a safe space for women to tell their own stories, the aim was to “unearth collective frames of reference, or constructed realities that guide the attribution of meaning and help account for how women create, enact or interpret the reality they inhabit” (Jamali, 2009, p. 239). The interview itself was conducted in Arabic online by two Palestinian researchers with their positioning mediating the interview dynamics. One of the researchers (second author) was a Palestinian residing in Israel at the time, while the other (third author) is a Palestinian from East Jerusalem. Interview data were transcribed and translated into English for the first author who is affiliated with Michigan State University (U.S.) as a member of the Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel. Identifying analytic themes in the data with sensitivity and reach, we leveraged our different perspectives to identify tacit assumptions and rich points (Agar, 1994).

Calling for research on complex social systems, Lemke (2000) contends that there is “still a strong individualist bias in our modernist traditions of research.” One consequence of this bias is that scholars frame and define their “objects of study in such a way that a single researcher could in principle come to understand them” (p. 288). Alternatively, the study of complex social systems requires a collaborative model: “‘it takes a village’ to study a [global] village” (p. 288). This model calls for new ways of thinking about and studying mobility in transnational contexts, including shifts toward cross-cultural research teams.

To fill gaps in Abeer’s story, data were supplemented with the analysis of digital artifacts: hundreds of social media posts; websites; online presentations at conferences; podcast interviews; videos; and news sites and magazines. These online sources further helped to establish her professional trajectory while tying it to specific moments and locations.

Negotiating Interlocking Systems of Oppression

To provide historical context, Abeer Abu Ghaith grew up in a Bedouin family in a Jordanian refugee camp. On her Facebook account after the outbreak of the post-October 7^th fighting, she posted a picture of her grandmother sitting alongside her in her youth. Accompanying the image she offered an account of how her grandparents’ family had been expelled from their lands in Be’er-Sheva (بئر السبع) in 1948. Similar to many Bedouin Palestinian families in that area, Abeer’s family was forced to relocate to a refugee camp. Growing up in the camp and listening to her grandmother’s stories about life in Be’er-Sheva, she often questioned why her family left home. Her grandmother’s response instilled a sense of the harsh realities that her community had endured: “Israeli settlers had killed many in our tribe, ravaged our lands, smashed our homes, leaving no choice but to leave” (Abu Ghaith, 2024). Such stories point to social and political forces that had mediated her early trajectory with these tales painting a “live picture of the hardships faced by Palestinian people” that had been “etched” into their identities. As she reflected, her grandparents had “passed down their tales to us, and now, we carry the emotional weight of those stories.” These intergenerational narratives played a central role in shaping her feminist consciousness and her sense of gendered resilience, as her grandmother’s strength and perseverance became a model for navigating life under occupation. Entangled in these stories were also the effects of militarization and colonial forces that had uprooted many of the Bedouins in the Negev. Critically, during this historical moment many of the Bedouin communities were separated and forced to flee into refugee camps in Jordan and Gaza. The ties between these communities probably contributed to Abeer’s family’s decision to move to Gaza (permitted to leave the refugee camp) and reinforced her identification with it, as would later become evident in the connections she established in her high-tech work.

Further knotted into Abeer’s trajectory were additional interlocking systems of power:

I am a girl who was brought up in a refugee camp in Jordan for 12 years, and I am from a very conservative Bedouin family, we were allowed as girls to study, but it was forbidden to work, it was one of the red lines. . . . So during studying I kept hearing comments from my family and cousins, “Why are you studying when you’re going to be in your husband’s kitchen in the future, and you’ll only hang your degree on the wall, and it won’t matter?” My own mother did not get a full education and got married when she was 15 years old.

Displaced from her home in British Mandate Palestine, Abeer studied at a UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) school with forty students in a class. With few employment opportunities, however, the most secure future for women was viewed as finding a husband. The norms surrounding women at work additionally marked a societal “red line.” Since women were unable to actually use their degrees in professional spheres, higher education was perceived as a performative exercise. This was symbolized by a university diploma hanging on a wall in their “husband’s kitchen.” The phrase itself signaled that women lacked full ownership even over the kitchens they managed. In this way, Abeer’s life was dictated not only by colonial regimes but also patriarchal ones.

These interlocking structures mediated her trajectory as she traversed the higher educational landscape. At the age of 12 Abeer’s family moved to Gaza and then near the outskirts of the West Bank city of Hebron. The city itself is divided into sectors. The majority of the city is under the control of the Palestinian Authority with approximately 35,000 inhabitants (B’teselem, 2003), while the latter remains under Israeli military control. This part includes the historic Old City with a smaller Jewish settler population of approximately 500. Palestinians experience notable physical violence and property damage from settlers and often harsh restrictions on their movement, including curfews, incursions, and checkpoints. These frequently impacted students’ studies.

I remember that at the time of tawjihi [senior year] exams, there was a curfew. When I went to take the exams, I didn’t know if there was an exam because there was a curfew, and out of nowhere my father would wake me up and tell me there was an exam. When I would go to the exams, there were always tanks and I remember exactly how they look until now. So, I was under an immense amount of psychological pressure.

Palestinian society places an emphasis on education as a marker of resistance (Johansson & Vinthagen, 2015) with the potential for liberation, empowerment, and fulfilling dreams of upward mobility. Motivating her pursuit of higher education, Abeer was admitted into university with strong entrance exam scores—despite the psychological stress—and graduated with honors in computer system engineering. However, even with job opportunities in Ramallah as the cosmopolitan center of technological innovation and entrepreneurial activity, the distance was prohibitive. Though only 25 miles from Hebron, checkpoints and roadblocks created barriers to travel.

The first job I was offered was in Ramallah, and my family did not want me to go. [They said] if you went to Ramallah, and you know about the political issues that happen. So if I went to Ramallah and got stuck there, or they invaded, so what can we do for you? They were strongly against me going to Ramallah, so all the opportunities that came to me because I was distinguished at university, my family rejected. Of course I had a kind of dissatisfaction. I mean, I felt a burning fire inside me. I wanted to work, I wanted to achieve my dream. Why would I just stay at home, so it was so tough for me.

Abeer’s story illustrates how militarization disproportionately impacted women’s professional mobilities. Kept home by naturally protective families, colonial and patriarchal regimes of mobility restricted Palestinian women in unexpected and mutually reinforcing ways. These constraints were coupled with a labyrinth of rules and restrictions on travel outside the territories for conferences and business meetings with long wait times to obtain travel visas and extended journeys to leave the oPt and travel through Jordan. Returning from the One Young World Summit in Bangkok where Abeer had carried the Palestinian flag during the opening ceremony, for example, her travel back from Jericho to Hebron (less than 70 km) took more than 7 hours due to checkpoints (Abu Ghaith, 2015).

Forced to remain at home, Abeer began to improve her English through online videos and took online courses to become a Cisco Certified Network Associate. However, though she passed all the tests, employers during job interviews remained skeptical, “But you’re a woman, when you get married and pregnant, how would you hold a computer?” Even after Abeer eventually received a university position teaching network engineering—following two years of searching—she continued to encounter persistent gender discrimination with many of the male students boycotting the class.

At first even the students did not accept me because I am a woman, but because I finally got an opportunity after two years I didn’t care, despite everything you’re going to accept me anyway . . . so I gave the lecture, there were only two students left [in the class] and I continued with those two, either way I’m going to give [the class] . . . I mean, after the two [students] they saw how I taught. I used to study [prepare] more than I taught at the university to prove myself. My mother used to tell me “you’re the teacher not the student” and I used to answer her saying “this is to become more expert in everything.” After that, I worked really hard and my relationship with them [students] was excellent, so I see them on the street now and they call to me “Miss Abeer?”

As part of an ongoing struggle, challenges to her legitimacy extended to professional conferences and meetings. Delivering a presentation as a featured speaker at a high-stakes meeting with representatives from the Palestinian Authority and U.S. Consulate, she found herself disrupted by another male speaker who publicly challenged her professional reputation while calling her a fasouna or “tiny woman.” Such comments point to continued moves to diminish her authority. In this fashion, mobile methods necessitate tracing how Palestinian actors negotiate both patriarchal and colonial policies of containment, erasure, and silencing.

Knotworking

Abeer negotiated these regimes through strategic “knotworking” with an array of actors and organizations. Through her efforts volunteering, Abeer gradually built a solid reputation and secured a job as a “hub manager” for the U.S. Consulate’s Business Women’s Forum in Ramallah. As opposed to her first job offer from the West Bank’s cultural and economic city center, this time she convinced her family to let her take the position since the staff and team were women. The job expanded her knowledge as she began to better understand what an entrepreneur is and does. It was during this time that she also “made a brand” for herself. In so doing, she developed social relations while strengthening connections with decision makers, ministers, consulates, and donors. Abeer subsequently joined an International Visitor Leadership Program in the United States that became her “gateway to the world.” There she learned the ways the U.S. supported small businesses through creating entrepreneurial “ecosystems.” Shaping and shaped by these dynamic ecosystems, she met other businesswomen from the Middle East who would later become her clients.

Cultivating these networks served as an explicit strategy for accumulating social capital:

Networking it was like my real capital during my establishing the business. So when I network, I mean I went to conferences. . .I participated in [a] program to empower women in the United States, and those people connect me with others, connect me with others. In this way, I have a big network in all them they try to support and help me. (Mizani, 2023)

Continually moving back and forth between the West Bank, Europe, and the United States, she established a web of connections. Her work at the Consulate further spun off into another program that connected women in and across 16 Arab countries. It was here that she launched an initiative, Stay Linked, aimed at finding jobs for women in remote areas through online work. Spinning off the project into her own venture she returned to her family home to run it. Working under a fig tree from her laptop she circumvented the limitations imposed by occupation: “I only had the internet, my laptop, and my network with me . . . Even if all the roads were closed in your face, [the laptop] is still your portal to the world. . .It was the only thing I needed, I would even take it out and use it under the fig tree and work, work, work.” Through her laptop she was networking, or knotworking, across near and distant spaces (in English and Arabic).

From her family’s home, Abeer created a non-employee firm (NEF) or a firm with no employees that presents itself as a larger, more stable business to acquire projects (Spinuzzi, 2015). Securing her first job for $20,000 from an American firm, she assembled a virtual team in Gaza. While the occupation prevents Palestinians from traveling between the West Bank and Gaza, Abeer was circumventing these limitations by assembling an “all-edge adhocracy” or an organization that rapidly links across boundaries, combines into temporary work groups, and swarms projects. Providing skilled high-technology jobs, she was not only reorganizing workplace spaces but also social and political ones as she subverted barriers imposed by occupation. Her digital knotworking shaped and was shaped by the construction of a transnational social field that enabled flows of information and activity across tightly controlled borders. These practices mediated new networks of power and new forms of resistance.

During this period, Abeer’s company underwent a number of contractions and transformations as it encountered financial challenges. Leveraging her network, she reversed her fortunes with the assistance of a U.S. mentor who helped Abeer to write a business plan. As part of a relational interplay, Abeer further signed a contract with a company in Dubai with the assistance of a female Palestinian minister, whom she had met through her networking. Unable to secure a visa, this figure included Abeer as part of a delegation that allowed her to travel and close the deal. However, the outbreak of a war in Gaza only two weeks after her return jeopardized the project’s status: “People were being bombed, there was no electricity, and no internet. People were dying and we had a deadline. But the team from Gaza called me and said, ‘Abeer, don’t worry, the bombs are falling on us. But we promise that if we live until tomorrow, we will deliver no matter what’” (International Labour Organization, 2017). As this scene foregrounds, Abeer traversed a deeply unstable and rapidly shifting situation as she negotiated messy circulations and plural geographies (Leander et al., 2010).

Launching a new initiative, MENA Alliances, the company’s mission was to hire Palestinians through contract work and place them in high-tech positions across the Middle East. To run this operation she opened an office in Gaza while hiring a young female college graduate, Yasmeen, to help manage it. Providing job opportunities to other females that were normally restricted from workplaces, Abeer was not only reshaping the economic landscape but also the social one. During this time, Abeer enrolled in a master’s-degree program in London. Immediately upon graduation, she traveled to the United States to grow and extend her networks with her mentor who arranged visits to investors and companies in New York and Silicon Valley. On Abeer’s Facebook she posted a video with the two of them next to the Golden Gate Bridge talking about their efforts to build bridges between the East and West (Abu Ghaith, 2018). This ongoing process of networking, or knotworking, mediated not only how Abeer moved in and across the high-tech ecosystem but also the changing nature of the ecosystem itself. Core to a mobile methodology is tracing these deeply intertwined processes, as ones that entail coordination, circulation, and transformation.

Transformations of Social and Material Spaces

Shifts in social structures paralleled new workspaces and office structures. This was evidenced in the open workspace design of Abeer’s office for MENA Alliances. Abeer’s philosophy behind this design draws on Silicon Valley, an organizational philosophy linked to the flattening of organizational hierarchies through encouraging open exchanges of ideas and disruptive thinking outside the box: “it’s a modern design and at the same time [it’s intended] . . . to change the stereotype in Hebron about the manager. The idea was to change the office in a way that there is no manager, and we all work together.” Engaged in placemaking, Abeer was weaving into the workplace concepts and practices that she acquired through international studies, programs, travels, and interactions. This was part of a wider move to help build a local entrepreneurial ecosystem in Hebron.

To forge connections and recruit local talent, Abeer located her office near the university. The aim was to create a place where male and female students could congregate with opportunities to participate in reading clubs, listen to lectures from international speakers, and engage in other forms of networking and collaboration in a challenge to more conservative norms where males and females were traditionally separated. Pointing to this move, she asked, “How would you go to a restaurant and work with a boy? So, they come to me here to this office and work.” Through the reconstruction of traditional spaces, gendered identities and norms were being rewoven.

These shifts were evidenced in an image (Figure 1) on Abeer’s Facebook feed (Abu Ghaith, 2022) that shows her sitting cross-legged on a series of wooden boxes spelling out MENA JOBS. In the image, she is wearing a hijab (head scarf) and jeans with an Apple notebook resting on her lap. Mixing modesty with modernity, the hijab celebrated the traditional Muslim woman in the workplace. The jeans and laptop were signs that such women could function as productive contributors in the modern workplace. The movable lettered blocks further indexed an ethos of play common in the startup community. Abeer was playing with her identity, so to speak, as she positioned herself in a global marketplace.

Figure 1.

A map of the world.

Critically, the backdrop to the scene is a black-and-white map with the words at the top, “A map of the world.” The map signified the uptake of a global or cosmopolitan perspective (also signaled by the English) with stenciled planes on transnational routes over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. This iconography symbolized a dream of travel beyond the narrow borders to which she had been confined. As Abeer articulated, “If you asked me at the time what I was planning to be [when young], I didn’t have a dream, but my goal was to travel. Positioning herself as a citizen of Palestine and citizen of the world, the map was bound up in the construction of a growing global imaginary. It was a remapping of her identity or what is variously referred to in the transnational literature as: transnational habitus (Guarnizo, 1997), double consciousness (Du Bois, 1903), bifocal perspective (Vertovec, 2004), or dual frame of reference (Guarnizo, 1997). These terms point to ways that transnational actors learn to see the world through the lens of home and host cultures. These views were more broadly transforming imaginaries within Palestinian society, as evidenced in stories about her family: “They used to say I dream a lot and that I can’t make it a reality. But now my aunts encourage their daughters to study by asking them: “Do you want to be like me, or like Abeer? Things have changed, and now they have a role model” (International Labour Organization, 2017). The map of the world signified a remapping or shift toward a worldview in which Palestinian women could reimagine other alternatives and models beyond their narrow confines. The very act of imagining travel and a professional pathway moreover served as an act of resistance to the occupation and the systematic effort to block Palestinians from imagining a future.

Through the design of her office, Abeer consequently might be understood as engaged in a process of placemaking in a region where space is deeply contested. Grounded in such moves is an understanding of maps not only as specific representations of the world, but also bound up in the production of those representations even as they serve as a proposition for how the landscape ought to be read (Barton & Barton, 1993). As such, the construction of the map might be read as a political and interpretive act disrupting patriarchal and settler colonial logics that rendered invisible Palestinian women. Abeer’s situated literacy and design practices were deeply bound up in this process as part of a dynamic, ongoing struggle.

Foregrounding the violent nature of this struggle and the fragility of the networks she had established were the October 7, 2023, attacks and outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas. The rapid escalation of violence disrupted many of the business connections that she had built, with many of her close friends and colleagues killed or missing. As she posted on her social media account, among them was her recruitment manager Yasmeen: “In the heart of Gaza, Yasmeen’s voice has gone silent, and we’ve lost all contact with her” (Abu Ghaith, 2023). Closer to home, the fighting in Gaza resulted in increasing militarization and restrictions within her own city of Hebron.

Critically, Abeer leveraged her own networks to relocate to London where she opened a branch of MENA Alliances. In shock at events unfolding in Gaza on the ground, she carried the “heavy weight” of “survivor guilt.” Taking up kickboxing to release stress, she began to post a series of blog entries on LinkedIn on applying lessons from the sport to business (Abu Ghaith, n.d.-b). She titled her first post (Abu Ghaith, n.d.-a), “As a Palestinian Entrepreneur, Kickboxing Taught Me How to Fight Back.” Replete with a picture of herself in the gym with a pink headscarf and boxing gloves, the image served as a metaphor of her own identity as a fighter, as she wrote:

In #2024, I didn’t just learn how to throw a punch

I learned how to keep standing, while building a company in a war zone, grieving from afar, and answering emails from developers who had just buried their families.

The messages came like punches to the gut.

☞ Rand had just lost her husband and two-year-old baby. She wasn’t looking for a job, she was looking for a reason to wake up.

☞ Ahmed, a WordPress developer, lost his wife, five children, and both parents. He didn’t send a CV, he sent a heartbreak.

These aren’t strangers from a newsfeed.

This is the community MENA Alliances exists to serve.

In late 2023, I left my home in Hebron (Palestine), not to escape, but to keep fighting for my people.

But I didn’t just cross borders, I left behind my family under daily threats: military checkpoints, settler violence, and home invasions.

The world calls this survival. I call it hashtag#resistance.

Once in London Abeer received thousands of pleas for jobs from colleagues and professionals who had also lost spouses, families, and means of employment. In response she launched a campaign to locate jobs for displaced Palestinians and place them in 200 companies. Central to her campaign was not only a focus on the loss of lives but also the loss of jobs as she posted on her site that 507,000 jobs had disappeared. To promote both her company and concomitant cause she continued to present and network at high-tech events. Through continually networking, or knotworking, new parts of a transnational social field were formed as other elements were decimated. Such shifts were central to the Palestinian predicament and entangled with the politics of mobility: mediating who/what moves, when, how far, how fast, and to what effect. Central to writing and rhetoric is the need to study these effects and their links to a shifting global order.

Conclusion

As this case study illustrates, technical and professional communication (TPC) must move beyond bounded, stable frameworks of rhetorical activity toward more fluid, networked understandings of workplace practices. Situated in the oPt, Abeer’s story demonstrates how actors navigate deeply contested spheres of activity—militarized, patriarchal, and digital—through a rhetorical and spatial repertoire of strategies and tools. Her movement across professional and transnational landscape is not only shaped by this process but actively reshapes it. These entangled processes call for a shift in TPC from traditional activity systems to mobility systems.

This reconceptualization significantly informs our theoretical and methodological frameworks in rhetoric, composition, and TPC. By tracing how actors such as Abeer mobilize resources through networking, or knotworking, this study introduces mobile methodologies capable of mapping literate and rhetorical action across transnational and deeply politicized spaces. These methods account for how literacy/rhetoric mediate access, resistance, identity, and transformation under structural constraints. Drawing from transnational feminist theory, spatial theory, and decolonial frameworks, this approach extends the field’s social justice commitments. It urges scholars to recognize rhetoric and literacy not simply as tools for navigating systems but as a force that can actively transform them—even in precarious, volatile, and restricted contexts.

In doing this work, we return to three key methodological moves. These are not intended as a linear process, but instead as a heuristic (Table 1) for attending to the links between literacy and the politics of mobility.

Table 1.

Mobile Methodology Heuristic.

Key Moves	Question(s)	Examples
Identify moments of translation	■ Who/what is doing the action? Answer is always at least two actors. ■ Who/what is doing the translating, and who/what is being translated? ■ How are signs, symbols, objects reinvoiced, rearticulated, remixed, repurposed, and/or hybridized in a moment within space-time?	■ We attend to ways Abeer’s professional attire and office design signify a remixing of modernity and modesty.
Localize the global	■ How are signs, symbols, objects reinvoiced, rearticulated, remixed, repurposed, and/or hybridized across multiple moments in space and time? ■ Who/what moves, how far, how fast, to what effect?	■ We trace how Abeer’s ideas about entrepreneurial ecosystems were learned (English) in a U.S. program and carried back to Hebron where they are introduced (Arabic) to local business men. We furthermore attend to how these ideas are manifested in her office redesign.
Redistribute the local	■ How is activity coordinated with other texts, tools, actors, and objects distributed across near and distant spaces?	■ We examine ways Abeer leveraged her laptop from home to simultaneously connect with workers in Gaza and clients in the United States, as part of a jointly mediated process.
Connect sites	■ What are the links, relations, and connections across the network(s)?	■ We establish links across varying webs of activity. For example, in our broader research we have traced not only the trajectory of Abeer but also of a number of other female entrepreneurs. Central to this broader study are the ways we begin to identify links or “knots” where the women’s activities intersect (e.g., attending the same conference).

Despite their emancipatory potential, the outbreak of war in Gaza on October 7, 2023, has also surfaced key limitations. As this account makes evident, the war has devastated the very ecosystem Abeer helped build. The war has also decimated Gaza’s information and communication technology (ICT) sector and eradicated what was previously 30% of the oPt’s ICT economy (Palestine TV, 2025). Military offensives have resulted in crumbling infrastructure, loss of skilled professionals, the dissolution of regional contracts, and collapse of economic viability. Notably, such destruction further means the loss of artifacts and archives, accumulated knowledge, and relatedly, members of the society with social and institutional histories and expertise—some of whom are now displaced, missing, hiding, or deceased. This erasure directly threatens our ability to conduct sustained academic inquiry in such spaces.

The crisis on the ground in Gaza reflects a wider crisis in academia, where escalating violence, war, authoritarianism, and the destabilization of governments and institutions are becoming more frequent and more severe. As such, this case raises urgent questions: what becomes of academic research when the fieldsite itself becomes unrecognizable? Increasingly, researchers are encountering large-scale and unexpected disruptions that challenge the very foundations of scholarly inquiry—its sites, participants, materials, and assumptions.

Methodologically, this study also underscores the limits and possibilities of mobile methods. Much of the data comes from digital artifacts and retrospective accounts, rather than direct observation. While mobile methods are finely calibrated for capturing situated literate activity, these methods face acute challenges in politically volatile contexts, where observation may be logistically impossible or ethically fraught. Yet, even within these constraints, mobile methods provide a vital lens for tracing literate actors on the move—offering grounded insights into how lives, identities, and professional practices unfold across constrained and shifting terrains.

Ultimately, this study unmasks how colonial and patriarchal logics silence, erase, tame, and contain local actors. It also shows how literacy and rhetoric, mobilized in context, resist those forces and imagine alternatives. Our hope is that through the telling and circulation of this case, we contribute—even in a small way—to supporting Abeer’s efforts and amplifying her story. In doing so, we reaffirm TPC capacity not only to analyze but also to participate in the making of more just, responsive, and transnationally engaged worlds.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Steven Fraiberg

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a Michigan State University Center for Interdisciplinarity Seed Grant.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Steven Fraiberg is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures at Michigan State University. His research examines literacy and rhetorical practices in the Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurial ecosystems. His publication, “Unsettling Start-Up Ecosystems: Geographies, Mobilities, and Transnational Literacies in the Palestinian Start-Up Ecosystem,” received a 2022 Conference on Composition and Communication award for Best Article Reporting Qualitative or Quantitative Research in Scientific and Technical Communication.

Arees Bishara is a visiting researcher in the Department of Political Science and Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in Italy, specializing in political and organizational sociology, technology and innovation, and Israel/Palestine studies. Her work examines the intersections of neoliberalism, settler colonialism, and high-tech industries, with a focus on Palestinian socioeconomic dynamics and dehumanization frameworks.

Aseel Khatib is a development and economic growth specialist with extensive experience managing donor-funded programs focused on workforce development, entrepreneurship, private sector competitiveness and trade facilitation. She has dedicated her efforts to supporting the growth of the Palestinian startup ecosystem and contributes to programs advancing public sector reforms and private sector growth to address challenges faced by Palestinian businesses and startups. She holds a BA in Global and International Studies with a concentration in Anthropology from Loyola University Chicago.

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