Dr. Tasnim Mahmoud Sammak is a Palestinian Muslim education lecturer, researcher, writer and organiser based in Naarm/Melbourne. Sammak is a founder of the Free Palestine Coalition Naarm and a mother to two boys. Sammak is from Yaffa, her father was born in a Gaza refugee camp after exile to Gaza during the Nakba and then again to a refugee camp in Jordan in 1967. Her mother’s side is from Ya’bad, Jenin, exiled to Jordan in 1967.

Sammak was born in Jordan - her family holds second class status in Jordan, with temporary Gazan visa status, driving her university-educated parents to migrate to Aotearoa/New Zealand in 1997 and then to ‘Australia’ in 2003. Her parents were student activists in Jordan and played a pivotal role in establishing Auckland Arab community infrustructure, like Arabic weekend school and Eid Bazaars, with their friends. Her parents sold imported items at the flea markets before converting their degrees to become school teachers at Australian Islamic schools.

Sammak grew up, lives and works on stolen land as someone who is a ‘settler here’, ‘Indigenous there’. She has never visited Palestine, neither has her grandmother returned. She finds home in connecting with and fighting alongside diverse and radical communities, local and digital, communities for all of us - the young, old, disabled, poor and racialised.

Sammak lectures in education Bachelors and Masters programs in curriculum and inclusion subjects, including Indigenous, multicultural and anti-racist education. Sammak engages in critical and feminist autoethnographic, counter-storytelling and speculative storyworlding research to explore youth radical political subjectivities, imaginaries and solidarities from a decolonial perspective.

She has written publicly on countering Islamophobia, Black-Palestinian and antizionist politics in settler-colonial Australia, with an abolitionist commitment to inspecting the effects of the counter-terror apparatus on the being and doing of politics otherwise. Her academic publications, writings and other works can be found on this updated site.