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.
DATE
6:00PM
Thursday, March 13, 2025
VENUE
Scheps Library, Room 457,
Department of Anthropology
Schermerhorn Extension
CAMPUS ACCESS
Open to CUID holders. Registration for non-CUID holders will close on March 11 due to University policies regarding guest access to campus. Each non-affiliate must RSVP for themself, with their name as it appears on their photo ID, and their own email.
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.