Picturing Palestine From Jordan: Contesting "Sykes-Picot Borders" Through Photography.

This article examines a photographic practice known as "trans-border" or "town-spotting" photography in Jordan and Palestine, where photographers capture images of sites across national borders and share them on social media with captions that often carry political and decolonial messages. The practice challenges the colonial and postcolonial borders—referred to as the "Sykes-Picot borders"—that divide Greater Syria and Palestine, emphasizing the artificiality of these boundaries and asserting a shared geography and collective memory. Through visual and textual elements, trans-border photography functions as a form of horizontal counter-mapping that de-borders, de-otherizes, and re-orders the landscape, creating a virtual space of interaction and resistance that contests dominant narratives and highlights affective, historical, and spatial connections across divided territories. This study contributes to border studies by focusing on everyday spatial practices in the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region, revealing how common citizens negotiate and contest borders beyond state-centric perspectives.