ATTEND | Palestinian Automata, 2/20/25

Since 2005, Gaza has been enclosed within a complex of drones, robotic weapons, and artificial intelligences that convert the Palestinian lifeworld into endless streams of data that drive Israeli siege warfare. This lecture maps this ecology of technics, its logics, and shifting diagrams of operation which have been modulated and intensified after October 2023 to carry out a semi-automated campaign of annihilation at a scale and pace unmatched in 21st Century warfare. 

Ali H. Musleh is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at the Columbia University Center for Palestine Studies. His research explores how weapon technologies shape the worlds of war we inhabit. With a focus on Palestine, his first book manuscript examines the movement of settler colonialism into the robotic age of war.

Organized by the Princeton Palestine Studies Colloquium. For more info, click here.

VENUE
McCosh 28
Princeton University

DATE
Feb 20, 2025
4:30 pm – 6:00 pm

ATTEND | Inscriptions Unbound: Edward Said’s Library

This exhibit features inscriptions from approximately 50 books selected from Edward Said’s book collections, which are housed in the Edward Said Reading Room (Butler Library), the Middle East Institute, and his former New York City apartment. The exhibit provides a sampling of the numerous inscriptions that friends, students, family members, and admirers left in the opening pages of the books that they gifted to Edward Said. These heartfelt messages reveal Said’s profound and far-reaching influence, weaving a narrative of deep and broad intellectual and personal connections across peoples, disciplines, genres, times, and geographies. The inscriptions bear testimony to Said’s intellectual brilliance, but also to the deep empathy, courage, and vision that defined his lifelong advocacy for justice, human rights, and intellectual freedom. 

Curated by Joy Al-Nemri (MESAAS alumna).

 

VENUE
Butler Library, Room/Area: 3rd Floor Exhibit Space
535 W. 114 St., New York, NY 10027

DATE
Thursday, February 13, 2025 - Thursday, May 15, 2025 (all day)

EVENT CONTACT
Kaoukab Chebaro,
Columbia University Libraries
kc3287@columbia.edu

READ | "The Question of Genocide" by Ali H. Musleh and Jonathan Beller

This written dialogue studies how the “question of genocide” has infiltrated media ecology and come to permeate every meaning, gesture, and relation. Confronting Israel's escalation, since October 2023, of its genocidal siege on Palestine, two writers (a Palestinian and a Jew) engage in an experiment of thinking together that is at once critical, theoretical, affective, and emergent, in an effort to configure and, indeed, live part of their solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation and self‐determination. Necessarily, the roles of photography, semiotics, social media, computation, racism, weaponry, and other machines of war and capital are here rendered as part of the micrological murmurations of thought, sensibility, and communication, even as they macrologically reform geopolitical terrains both real and imagined. Thought, feeling, knowledge, epistemology, intellectual, and cultural practice are all understood to unfold in the theater of racial capitalist warfare that offers up genocide not as exception but as paradigm.

Citation
Jonathan Beller, Ali Musleh; The Question of Genocide. Social Text 1 December 2024; 42 (4 (161)): 81–102. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-11369803

Jonathan Beller is professor of humanities and media studies and cofounder of the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of English and of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University; Visiting Professor at REMESO / Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society, Linköping University, Sweden; and Visiting Researcher, University of the Arts, Helsinki Research Institute, Finland.

Ali H. Musleh is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at the Columbia University Center for Palestine Studies.

ATTEND | 'Reimagining Race and Technology,' 11/11/24

The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race presents "Reimagining Race and Technology," a roundtable featuring emerging scholars working at the intersection of race and technology. Panelists will discuss how digital technology is deployed in war zones, how corporations manage access to democratic expression online, how digital surveillance works in U.S. higher education, and how race and racism appear in the digital collections at Columbia's Libraries. Their presentations will be followed by conversation and audience Q&A. Please reach out to cser@columbia.edu with any questions. 

SPEAKERS
Ali Musleh is Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies here at Columbia. Prior to that, he was a researcher at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UH-M) Hawaiʻi Research Center for Futures Studies. In 2022, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at UHM, where he taught global politics and alternative futures. His first book project is titled To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth? Using his dual background in design and political theory, he focuses on Israel's design, development, and deployment of drones, autonomous weapons, and artificial intelligence, treating them as technological processes of managing and differentiating forms of life.

Irina Kalinka is a Fellow, Society of Fellows at Columbia and a lecturer at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society as well as the Department of English and Comparative Literature. A scholar of political theory and digital media with a global purview, Irina centers her research around platform studies, democracy, and digital publics. She completed her dissertation, "The Political Imaginary of User Democracy," in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University in 2023. In this project, Irina argues that tech-corporations promote and engender their own normative conceptualization of democracy through the services they oversee.

Madi Whitman is the Director of Undergraduate Studies and Assistant Director of Curriculum Development in the Center for Science and Society and a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology. As a sociocultural anthropologist and science and technology studies (STS) researcher, Madi studies how technologies, institutions, and subjectivities are made together. This research is currently animated by questions about surveillance and marginality in changing regimes of data collection in higher education in the United States. Prior to coming to Columbia, Madi was involved in collaborations with the National Science Foundation Center for Science of Information. Madi earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Purdue University in 2020, and was previously a Visiting Research Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Brian Luna Lucero is the Digital Projects Librarian at Columbia University and a lecturer at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and in the History Department. He assists Columbia’s librarians and faculty in creating digital collections and exhibits from Columbia’s extensive physical archives. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of New Mexico in 2012. His dissertation, "Invention and Contention: Memory, Place, and Identity in the American Southwest, 1848-1940," examines memory and commemoration of the Spanish colonial past in three Spanish settlements that grew into prominent American cities: Tucson, Arizona, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and San Antonio, Texas.

ATTEND | Settler Colonialism and Genocide: From Palestine to Turtle Island 10/17/24

Announcing “Settler Colonialism and Genocide: From Palestine to Turtle Island”, with J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Rashid Khalidi. Introduced and moderated by Sean Jacobs, Mellon Initiative Fellow 2024/25.

We are thrilled to announce the first Mellon Initiative guest speaker event of the academic year. The talk, “Settler Colonialism and Genocide: From Palestine to Turtle Island”, will feature dialogue between Professors J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Princeton University) and Rashid Khalidi (Columbia University). Sean Jacobs, Mellon Initiative Fellow 2024/25, will moderate the discussion. 

Both scholars are deeply engaged in research focusing on issues of settler colonialism and decolonization, indigeneity, race and ethnicity, nationalism and national identity, and other critical topics. This talk aims to bridge their work and explore connections between Palestine and Turtle Island.

SPEAKERS
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Ph.D. (Kanaka Maoli/Native Hawaiian) is Eric and Wendy Schmidt Professor of Indigenous Studies, Professor of Anthropology in the Effron Center for the Study of America and the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her research focuses on Native American and global indigeneities, settler colonialism and decolonization, race and ethnicity, gender & sexuality, and anarchist politics. She is the author of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Duke University Press 2008); and Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism (Duke University Press 2018). She also has an edited book titled, Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders (University of Minnesota Press 2018) which includes select interviews drawing from her vast archive of a public affairs radio program, “Indigenous Politics: from Native New England and Beyond,” which was produced in the studios of WESU (Middletown, CT) from 2007-2013, and aired on over a dozen stations through the Pacifica Radio Network. Her work is widely published in a range of academic journals and edited books, and she also co-edits a book series on “Critical Indigeneities” for the University of Carolina Press. Kauanui is one of the six co- founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, established in 2008. And she is the recipient of the Western History Association’s 2022 American Indian History Lifetime Achievement Award.

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies Emeritus at Columbia University. He received a B.A. from Yale University in 1970, and a D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1974. He has taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, and the University of Chicago. He is a past President of the Middle East Studies Association, and was editor and then co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Khalidi is the author of: The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 [2020: MEMO Book Award]; Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. has Undermined Peace in the Middle East [2013: Lionel Trilling Book Award; MEMO Book Award]; Sowing Crisis: American Dominance and the Cold War in the Middle East [2009]; The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood [2006]; Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East [2004]; Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness [1997: Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Prize; reissued with a new introduction in 2010]; Under Siege: PLO Decision-making during the 1982 War [1986; reissued with a new preface in 2014]; and British Policy towards Syria and Palestine, 1906-1914 [1980]. His books have been translated into a dozen languages. He has written over 100 scholarly articles, and is the co-editor of Palestine and the Gulf [1982]; The Origins of Arab Nationalism [1991]; and The Other Jerusalem: Rethinking the History of the Sacred City [2020].  

Sean Jacobs is a professor of international affairs at The New School and publisher of Africa Is a Country. He was born and grew up in Cape Town, South Africa. His Mellon Initiative Fellowship project focuses on developing a handbook to provide foundational resources for research on decolonizing international affairs and reshape how the discipline is taught.

Presented by Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence in the Office of the Provost, The New School.