Nora Al-Aati is a Kuwait University Fellow pursuing a Ph.D. in Anthropology. Her research takes place in Qalhat, Oman, a town known for its UNESCO-designated medieval Islamic sites. Nora’s research explores how people in Qalhat understand and define what is considered “the past” through conceptualizations of tarikh (تاريخ] (authorized historical knowledge], turath (تراث( [memory, materiality, and affect as “heritage”], and khurafat (خرافات] (knowledge and practices relegated as “superstition”]. Influenced by Omani modernization and heritage regimes, knowledge about the past has been organized through temporality and authority, shaping what becomes legible as “history” and what is dismissed and silenced. Nora’s work traces how residents of Qalhat (e.g., heritage employees, poets, tribal leaders, Islamic teachers, businessowners) navigate these categories in everyday life—through stories, ritual practices, encounters with the unseen, and relationships to landscape and seascape—to show that the past is not a fixed archive but a living, relational field of meaning. Her research questions ask: How do Qalhat residents navigate and reconfigure the distinctions through which the state authorizes tarikh and turath while disqualifying other modes of knowing as khurafat? How do engagements with Qalhat’s Islamic ruins—as material remains, sites of memory, and loci of unseen presence—destabilize boundaries between history and belief, heritage and superstition, past and present? How do such encounters generate temporal frameworks that coexist with, exceed, or quietly contest state narratives? Guided by a commitment to care, collaboration, and deep listening, Nora approaches research as a shared practice rather than an extractive one. As a Kuwaiti trained within American anthropology, she is committed to honoring the knowledge held with communities of the Arabian Peninsula and the ontologies that coexist with, and sometimes unsettle, state-authoritative ways of knowing. Her project reflects her belief that scholarship is most powerful when it is accountable to the people and places that make it possible