‘Home’ has been used as a boundary-forming device to identify, homogenize, normalize, and exclude. Composed of family and nation, and attendant notions of their sanctity, ‘home’ is no longer open to reinterpretation and reconfiguration; it is pressured as a lived space. Insurgent Domesticities brings into focus the insurgent environments, objects, and practices that make up the maintenance, creation, labor, and intimacies of home. This collective conversation investigates the more processual aspects of domesticity to interrogate the politics of ‘home’ through histories of solidarity, disobedience, stealth, and militancy, from the scale of the clothesline to that of the state.

This discussion is presented in conjunction with our Settlement Symposium on March 28, 2025. (Separate event: more info here)
Learn more about the Insurgent Domesticities working group and access teaching tools here.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.

Speakers

Ana Gisele Ozaki is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Architectural History at the University of Pennsylvania. Ozaki's research investigates the complex ways racial ideologies have interfered with architectural understandings of climate and the environment within the African diaspora, mainly within the Black Atlantic. Centered on Brazil's construction of an architectural ideal for the rest of the tropics, her book project developed from her dissertation, "The Brazilian Atlantic: New 'Brazils,' Plantation Architecture, Race, and Climate in Brazil and Africa, 1910-1974," examines the country's connections to West and Southern Africa, specifically Nigeria, Angola, and Mozambique, albeit often mediated by Europe.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an architectural historian and Assistant Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, and author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press), on the spatial politics, ecologies, iconography, visual rhetoric, and long colonial traditions of the UNHCR-administered camps at Dadaab, Kenya. She is the author of Minnette De Silva: Intersections (Mack Books), and her book manuscript Ecologies of the Past: The Inhabitations and Designs of Anil and Minnette de Silva analyzes the politics of heritage environments through the work of Sri Lankan architect Minnette de Silva and art historian Anil de Silva-Vigier.

Barbara Penner is a Professor in the Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. She is presently the Co-Director of the MA Architectural History, one of the oldest and most prestigious postgraduate architectural history programs in the UK, and supervises numerous PhD students. She was formerly BSA's Director of Research and REF lead (2016-21). She has recently completed a Leverhulme Major Fellowship (2021-3).

Hollyamber Kennedy is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University. She researches and teaches modern architectural and landscape history, with an emphasis on heritage politics and the material and environmental legacies of colonial building cultures and land practices. Focusing on transregional links between sub-Saharan Africa and Central and Eastern Europe, her work investigates the ways in which architecture and infrastructure facilitated imperial governance and reshaped agrarian modernities through rural modernization projects across the 19th and 20th centuries.

Iulia Statica is Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research explores the legacies of socialist built environments in Eastern Europe, focused on gendered experiences of spatial infrastructures including mass housing and urban landscapes. Her current work investigates processes of feminised migration from the Global East and their affective and infrastructural effect on domesticity and postsocialist/postcolonial spatial practices. She employs documentary film in her research; her film My Socialist Home premiered in London in 2021. She is the author of Urban Phantasmagorias: Domesticity, Production and the Politics of Modernity in Communist Bucharest.

Lilian Chee is an Associate Professor of Architectural Design and Visual Cultures at the Department of Architecture in the National University of Singapore, where she co-leads the Research by Design Cluster, and serves as Assistant Dean at the College of Design and Engineering. Her recent work includes Architecture and Affect (2023), Art in Public Space (2022), and Remote Practices (2022), as well as documentaries To Work At Home (forthcoming, 2025), Objects for Thriving (2022,) and 03-FLATS (2014). She led the Social Sciences Research Council-funded Foundations for Home-based Work(2021-24) and conducted a limited study on dementia, care, and public housing (2023-24). She writes on affect, architectural representation, domesticity, and works creatively across the intersections of architecture and visual cultures.

Madiha Tahir is a Postdoctoral Associate and Assistant Professor of American Studies at Yale University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of technology and war with interest and expertise in digital war, surveillance, militarism, and empire and technology studies from below. Her work intersects the anthropology of war with insights from the fields of postcolonial, South Asian, and Black Studies literatures to reframe our understanding of technology, war, and US imperialism.

Neferti Xina M. Tadiar is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. She is the author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009), and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004), which was awarded the Philippine National Book Award in Cultural Criticism for 2005. She is also co-editor of Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation (with Angela Y. Davis).

Rishav Kumar Thakur is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He studies articulations of, and claims around, identity and belonging in Assam, India. In doing so, his work aims to understand patterns of violence, dissent, and queer imaginations of community in the region.

S.E. Eisterer is an Assistant Professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture.

With Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt, Joanna Joseph, and Meriam Soltan from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.

Image: House garden in Fishtown, Philadelphia
Photo: Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi

Presentations by these two working groups are organized by the Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for Humanities and co-sponsored by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, the Barnard Department of Africana Studies, the Barnard Department of Art History, the Barnard Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Barnard and Columbia Department of Architecture, the Center for Comparative Media, the Center for Palestine Studies, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, the Center for the Study of Social Difference Insurgent Domesticities Working Group, the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, the Ifriqiyya Colloquium, the Institute of African Studies, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the Institute for Research in African American Studies, the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, and the South Asia Institute.

A discussion with the co-editors and two contributors of the newly released edited volume, Producing Palestine: The Creative Production of Palestine Through Contemporary Media, which addresses the creative labor of producing Palestine in technological and media spaces, crossing genres of popular culture and disciplinary boundaries. For more info about the volume, click here.

Hadeel Assali is an anthropologist and former engineer whose work looks at the ongoing colonial legacies of the discipline of geology as well as anti-colonial ways of knowing and relating to the earth in southern Palestine. She received her PhD in Anthropology in 2021 from Columbia University. She examines the narratives deployed to produce space(s) and how they become imbued with the authority to do so. She runs the “Race, Climate Change, and Environmental Justice” seminar, which was founded by earth science graduate students, with the goal of exploring ways of decolonizing the earth sciences. She is also a filmmaker and writer whose work draws heavily from her family stories based in Gaza, Palestine. 

Dina Matar is a Professor of Political Communication and Arab Media at the Centre for Global Media and Communication at SOAS.  She has an  MSc in Comparative Politics (LSE) and a PhD in Media and Communications (LSE). My PhD is from the London School of Economics. She has conducted research in the Arab World, particularly Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Before joining academia, she worked as a foreign correspondent covering the Middle East and then an editor working on the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

Helga Tawil-Souri works on technology, media, culture, territory and politics in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Palestine. Helga is co-editor with Dina Matar of Gaza as Metaphor (Hurst 2016) and Producing Palestine (Bloomsbury 2024), and currently serves on the editorial boards of Social Text and Public Culture. She has published a wide range of articles and chapters on checkpoints, borders, infrastructure, media and telecom, surveillance, and other topics, and has been experimenting with collage and visual forms of expression. 

Rayya El-Zein is a cultural ethnographer whose work explores how agency and political subjectivity are recognized and called into being. Her research has centered artists, technologists, activists, and scientists. Her book, Filling the Head: Listening to Rap in Arabic is forthcoming from Indiana University Press (June 2025). More about her work at www.www.rayyaelzein.com.com.

Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature is a digital-born project that retraces and remaps the global story of Palestinian literature in the 20th century, starting from the Arab world and going through Europe, North America, and Latin America. Sitting at the intersection of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, Country of Words creates a digitally networked and multilocational literary history—a literary atlas enhanced. The virtual realm acts as the meeting place for the data and narrative fragments of this literature-in-motion, bringing together porous, interrupted, disconnected, and discontinuous fragments into an elastic, interconnected, and entangled literary history.

SPEAKER
Refqa Abu-Remaileh is Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Film at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. As Principal Investigator, she led the European Research Council project PalREAD (2018–2023). She is author of Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature (Stanford University Press, 2023) and creator of the Arabic-language podcast Balad min Kalam: Conversations on Palestinian Literature available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Organized by the Arabic Seminar and co-sponsored by the Center for Palestine Studies and the Middle East Institute.

Join the Amman Global Center and the Center for Palestine Studies for an evening with Brian Boyd as he examines the near-total absence of prehistoric research in contemporary archaeology of Palestine.

This event will take place in-person at the Columbia Global Center in Amman.
5 Muhammad As-Saeed Al-Batayni Street Amman, Amman Governorate Jordan

This talk explores how “prehistory” was introduced during the British Mandate, embedding frameworks that continue to shape archaeological narratives, public perceptions, and higher education today. Archaeologists (primarily British and French) during the Mandate classified prehistoric material remains by cultural and ethnic groups, an approach fundamental to early Western archaeology but still pervasive in 21st-century studies of the area. The imposed framework of “Palaeolithic-Mesolithic-Neolithic,” developed for Europe’s past, remains dominant, shaping interpretations of social and ethnic development. While much has been written on archaeology’s influence on historical narratives, the lasting impact of European prehistory, introduced in the 1920s, remains under-examined. Revisiting these frameworks reveals archaeology’s role in shaping our understanding of history and consider its obligations in the present.  

Brian Boyd is Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, Director of Museum Anthropology and Co-Chair of the Seminar on Human-Animal Studies at Columbia University, New York City. He works on the later prehistory and politics of archaeology in southwest Asia, with a focus on Palestine. His current fieldwork takes place in the West Bank, where he co-directs (with Dr. Hamed Salem, Birzeit University) a community archaeology/museum project in the landscapes of the village of Shuqba, northwest of Ramallah. Brian co-chaired the Anthropology Division of the New York Academy of Sciences (2013-2017), and he currently serves on the board of the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC), and the Theoretical Archaeology Group Committee in both the UK and North America.

VENUE
East Gallery, Maison Française, Buell Hall

Bye Bye Tiberias Screening followed by a Q&A with Director Lina Soualem and Thomas Dodman
Lina Soualem, 2023, 82 min. In French and Palestinian Arabic with English Subtitles
Watch the Trailer

In her early twenties, Hiam Abbass left her native Palestinian village to pursue her dream of becoming an actress in Europe, leaving behind her mother, grandmother, and seven sisters. Thirty years later, her filmmaker daughter Lina returns with her to the village, questioning for the first time her mother’s bold choices, her self-imposed exile, and the profound influence the women in their family have had on both their lives.

Set between past and present, Bye Bye Tiberias weaves together contemporary imagery, family footage from the 1990s, and historical archives to portray four generations of courageous Palestinian women. Through their enduring bonds, they preserve their stories and legacy, despite exile, dispossession, and heartbreak.

This urgent personal documentary of longing, displacement and connection illuminates Palestinian family archives at a time when these documents and stories are being erased in the ongoing genocide. Cinematically weaving generations of matrilineal history with that of her motherland, we honour filmmaker Lina Soualem for her courage and artistry.

Jury Statement, Feature Documentary Award at DOXA Documentary Film Festival 2024

French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker and actress Lina Soualem was born and is based in Paris. After studying History and Political Science at La Sorbonne University, she worked as a programmer for the International Human Rights Film Festival in Buenos Aires. Soualem’s debut feature documentary, Their Algeria, premiered at the 2020 Visions du Réel International Film Festival and went on to win several prestigious awards, including the First Film Award at CINEMED Montpellier International Festival of Mediterranean Film, the Best Arab Documentary Award at El Gouna Film Festival, and the Best Documentary Award at CINEMANIA Film Festival 2021, among many others. Bye Bye Tiberias premiered at Venice Days in 2023.

In addition to her work behind the camera, Lina Soualem has acted in three feature films directed by Hafsia Herzi, Hiam Abbass, and Rayhana. She is currently developing projects as a writer in fiction, documentaries, and TV series.

Thomas Dodman is Associate Professor of French and Director of the History & Literature Program at Columbia University.

This event is organized by Maison Française and co-sponsored by the Center for Palestine Studies. It is presented in the series "In the Middle: Women Documenting Arab Struggles", produced by Columbia Maison Française. For information about other events in the series, please visit the Maison Française website.

PLEASE NOTE The Columbia campus is currently open only to Columbia-affiliated guests (with a CUID). Outside guests who register to attend a public event will be allowed to enter campus for the event if we provide their names and emails to Public Safety the day before. Please be sure to register for any events at least 48 hours ahead of time and you will get an email from caladminnoreply@columbia.edu with a unique QR code giving you access to the campus. Don't forget to bring your ID with you.