Barnard Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Presents:
"Surveillance, Fear, and Israel's Settler Colonialism"
A talk by Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kervokian, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Free and open to the public
Control and monopoly over territory, life, terminology and the practice of naming enables colonizers to accumulate their power through dispossession, and simultaneously recompose themselves with the other.
By discussing surveillance over colonized Palestinian subjects, I wish to argue that colonial dispossession functions in different layers. The presentation will use David Harvey's concept "accumulation of dispossession" to claim that surveillance over living and dead bodies of the colonized, and the military control over their land, life and political economy, imposes new regimes of regulation and accumulation by dispossession, and veils the exploitative relationships between the colonized and the colonizer.
The psychological violence, including the promotion and production of the colonized as feared other and the legal violence that legislates laws and regulations and produces the colonized, as Fanon explains, in "zoological" terms, imposes heavy surveillance over the colonized. By discussing Israel's surveillance regime in Occupied East Jerusalem, I wish to discuss the historical injustices and the coercive power of continuing dispossession that manufactures the colonizer as socially superior, while denying the colonized the right to home, family, society, and dignified living.
Understanding the way Israel's surveillance regime contributes to accumulation by dispossession will have a crucial bearing on the organization and articulation of dissent in the present.
Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian grew up in Haifa, Israel and now lives in Jerusalem. She received an M.A. in 1989 and a Ph.D. in 1994 from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has been visiting professor, Faculty of Law, at UCLA and USC, and is also a lecturer, Faculty of Social Work, at The Hebrew University. Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a criminologist and specialist in human rights and women's rights. She consulted with Human Rights Watch on its most recent report on violence against Palestinian women in Israel and with the UNIFEM division of the United Nations.
Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian grew up in Haifa, Israel and now lives in Jerusalem. She received an M.A. in 1989 and a Ph.D. in 1994 from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has been visiting professor, Faculty of Law, at UCLA and USC, and is also a lecturer, Faculty of Social Work, at The Hebrew University. Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a criminologist and specialist in human rights and women’s rights. She consulted with Human Rights Watch on its most recent report on violence against Palestinian women in Israel and with the UNIFEM division of the United Nations.
Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian has conducted academic research on the multiple forms of violence inflicted upon Palestinian women and girls. She is on the board of the New Israel Fund and collaborates with Israelis on campaigns to help achieve peace and justice through better understanding across cultures. Since 2006, she has been director of the Gender Studies Project at Mada al-Carmel, Haifa, the nonprofit Arab Center for Applied Social Research located in Haifa, Israel. In place of the terms "honor crime" and "crime of passion," she prefers to refer to the victimization of Palestinian women as "femicide" because, as she explains, these crimes involve no honor, passion, or romance. She has trained women activists in the West Bank and Gaza regarding their rights under law and established a hotline for abused Palestinian women.
A prolific author, Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian has written extensively on domestic violence, the criminal justice response to violence against Palestinian women, child abuse, and women in Palestinian society. In addition to journal articles and book chapters, she has authored two books: Tribal Justice and its Effect on Formal Justice in Palestine (Institute of Law, Birzeit University, 2003) and Femicide in Palestinian Society (UNIFEM, New York, 2001). She is also the author of Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case-Study (2009) published by Cambridge Studies in Law and Society.
Cosponsors
Barnard Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies.
November 18, 2013, 6PM
Barnard 302, Barnard College
Columbia University