APPLY | Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Post-doctoral Award in Palestine Studies

The Center for Palestine Studies is now accepting applications to the 2022-2023 Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Post-doctoral Fellowship in Palestine Studies!

The Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (IAL) Award is a year-long fellowship that recognizes and fosters innovative and ground-breaking scholarship on issues related to Palestine and Palestinians. The award will support a scholar working on a book project in any field of the humanities or social sciences who will spend the academic year at Columbia University in New York, pursuing their research and writing, contributing to curricular matters, and participating in the intellectual life of the Center for Palestine Studies.

Established in 2010, the IAL Award was made possible through the generosity of the late Abdel Mohsin Al-Qattan in honor of his friend, the Palestinian scholar and intellectual, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (1929-2001). Their close friendship began in the aftermath of the Nakba of 1948 and evolved into a shared commitment to justice for Palestinians to be realized through support for excellence in higher education and scholarship. Major support for the IAL Award comes from the A.M. Qattan Foundation with additional support from individual donors.

The international competition is open to post-doctoral scholars who share the mission of the Center for Palestine Studies to advance the production and circulation of knowledge on Palestinian history, culture, society, and politics through outstanding scholarship.

For more information including eligibility and supporting materials, visit the IAL section of the CPS website.

For questions about the fellowship or application, email palestine@columbia.edu.

READ | Translation of Lila Abu-Lughod's "Imagining Palestine's Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics" by Aamer Ibraheem

An Arabic translation of Lila Abu-Lughod's "Imagining Palestine's Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics" by Aamer Ibraheem is available in Omran 38 (Autumn): 175-206.

About the article
This reflection on Palestine’s political impasses in relation to the experiences of other colonized places and peoples was inspired by the current ferment in critical indigenous and native studies, and now Palestinian studies, about settler colonialism. Tracing the promises and pitfalls of new imaginations of sovereignty and self-determination emerging through indigenous activism, the essay reflects on museums and contested rituals of liberal recognition in North America and Australia to highlight both the stark differences in the situations of Palestinians under Israeli rule and the radical significance of the recent efflorescence of Palestinian cultural projects. Focusing particularly on the history of the Palestinian Museum (that opened in Birzeit in 2016), the article argues that the productivity of the settler-colonial framework lies less in the way it maps directly onto the situation on the ground than in the new solidarities it engenders and its potential to burst open the Palestinian political imagination. “Imagining Palestine's Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics" was originally published in Critical Inquiry 47 in 2020.

Lila Abu-Lughod is The Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

​Aamer Ibraheem is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York.

Omran is a quarterly peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the social sciences and published by The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Issue 38 is a special edition on Settler Colonialism and the Palestinian-Zionist Conflict.

About Omran’s special issue Settler Colonialism and the Palestinian-Zionist Conflict
Following an introduction by guest editor Nadim Rouhana,  this issue includes six studies in a special issue on Settler Colonialism and the Palestinian-Zionist Struggle: "Settler Colonialism or Apartheid: Do We Have to Choose?" by Azmi Bishara; "Zionism and the Dilemma of Legitimizing Settler Colonialism: Religious Discourse as a Response to the Palestinian Resistance" by Nadim Rouhana; "Rethinking the Condition of Indirect Rule: Metamorphosis of the Israeli Colonial Governance and the Palestinian Resistance" by Hani Awad & Maryam Hawari; "Islamophobia, Antisemitism, Zionism, Settler Colonialism" by Lorenzo Veracini; "Where in the World is Palestine?" by Hamid Dabashi; and "International Law and Settler Colonialism in Historical Palestine" by Ilan Pappe. Also provided is a translation of Lila Abu-Lughod's "Imagining Palestine's Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics" by Aamer Ibraheem.

The book review section includes Ahmed Mamoun's review of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi; Yara Nassar's review of Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial by Somdeep Sen; Maryam AlHajri's review of Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities by Mahmood Mamdani; and, finally, Ihab Maharmeh's review of Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel by Andrew Ross.

APPLY | Open Call from The Palestinian Museum for Applications to Workshop Concerned with Land Rights

Land Rights in Palestine and South Africa (1880 – 2022): between Ideological Imaginaries and Creative Reclamation

A Virtual Workshop
Organized by The Palestinian Museum
Submission Deadline: 18 November 2021

An ongoing creative research project between the Palestinian Museum’s Research Program and the School of Architecture, Planning & Geomatics at the University of Cape Town, considers the historical similarities and peculiarities of the systematic regime of human rights violations and land confiscation of the segregationist policies in South Africa and the Israeli Occupation of the Palestine Territory.

Through workshops, mobility exchange and creative transfer, the objective is to bridge between a museographic approach on preserving, documenting and exhibiting the history of spoliation of the landscape, and a design-based approach on how to conceptualise and exhibit the transformation of the topography of occupation. The project aims to support the production of creative research and interventions that promote intercultural dialogue in public space, facilitate opportunities for exchange in museum and institutional environments, with the eventual publication and production of research findings and interventions made accessible to a diverse audience interested in the conflictual relationship between ideological authority, political power and land as a human right.

As a first public step of the research project, the workshop “Land Rights between Ideological Imaginaries and Creative Reclamation” invites contributions from artists, students, researchers, cultural practitioners and institutions in Palestine, South Africa and their diasporas, to assist in framing focuses on reclaiming the collective landscape of Palestine by overcoming colonial boundaries that fragment the map through artistic practices and research. We are interested in surfacing the complex layering of memory, belonging and identity embedded in land and how these are entangled with ideological inscriptions of territory. More specifically, and in light of the continuing land violations, how Palestinians overcome political and geographical fragmentation on metaphorical and tangible levels vis-à-vis the ideologies which hold the land hostage to zero-sum prophecies and violently transform maps into multi-layered projections of historical violence.

Over the 4-day workshop to be held on Wednesday 8th, Thursday 9th, Monday 13th and Tuesday 14th of December 2021, we aim to collectively shape the focus of the research inquiry and the creative modes of engagement. Please send the following to research@palmuseum.org. Please add Land Rights to the email subject:
- CV
- An abstract of 200 words
- Short bio
- Project relevant visual material

Kindly confirm your ability to attend the virtual workshop days on Wednesday 8th, Thursday 9th, Monday 13th and Tuesday 14th of December

READ | Interview w/ Gil Hochberg about her forthcoming book, Becoming Palestine

Read an interview in Jadaliyya with Professor Gil Hochberg about her forthcoming book, Becoming Palestine, by Bandar Alsaeed (PhD Student, MESAAS, Columbia University). Becoming Palestine will be published by Duke University Press in December 2021.

About Becoming Palestine
In Becoming Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers, dancers, and activists use the archive in order to radically imagine Palestine's future. She shows how artists such as Jumana Manna, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Farah Saleh, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme reimagine the archive, approaching it not through the desire to unearth hidden knowledge, but to sever the identification of the archive with the past. In their use of archaeology, musical traditions, and archival film and cinematic footage, these artists imagine a Palestinian future unbounded from colonial space and time. By urging readers to think about archives as a break from history rather than as history's repository, Hochberg presents a fundamental reconceptualization of the archive's liberatory potential.

Gil Hochberg is the Ransford Professor of Hebrew, Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies, Columbia University. Gil is also a member of the Center for Palestine Studies Faculty Collective.

“Our job, I strongly believe, is to imagine. To imagine is to refuse to accept that the pragmatic and the so-called “realistic” are the only frameworks available for politics. To imagine is to insist that there is more.”
— Gil Hochberg

ATTEND | Insaniyyat Talk with Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins will give the third lecture in the Fall 2021 Insaniyyat Talk Series

Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is Associate Professor and director of Anthropology Program at Bard College, New York. Her research interests include infrastructure, waste, environment, colonialism, austerity, and platform capitalism. She is a winner of several academic awards including the Middle East Studies Association's Albert Hourani Book Award (2020).

Wednesday, November 10th, 2021 at 18:00 Palestine time, via Zoom
(this talk will be delivered in English)

For more info about this talk or the Insanyyat Talk Series, please visit Insaniyyat’s website.

ATTEND | VIRTUAL CONFERENCE CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF THE JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES

Virtual Conference
October 20-22, 2021
The Institute for Palestine Studies invites you to participate in a virtual conference in celebration of 50 years of the Journal of Palestine Studies. Since its inception in 1971, the Journal has made an effort to document, substantiate, and firmly establish a counternarrative to the widespread, insistent denial of the existence of the Palestinian people and their histories.

The speakers will expand on their research and insight around the archive and future of the Journal's knowledge production. The virtual conference includes a panel, roundtable, and two workshops.

Speakers
Rashid Khalidi, Salim Tamari, Leila Farsakh, Alex Winder, Sreemati Mitter, Sherene Seikaly, Nadine Naber, Rana Barakat, Tareq Radi, Mezna Qato, Nour Joudah, Maria Khoury, Omar Baddar, Laura Albast, and Sayf Abdeen

About the Journal for Palestine Studies
The Journal of Palestine Studies (JPS) is a refereed multidisciplinary journal published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis on behalf of the Institute for Palestine Studies. Since its founding in 1971, JPS has been the English-language academic journal of record on Palestinian affairs. The Journal publishes original articles that span the humanities and social sciences, including, but not limited to, history, political science, international relations, law, economic development, geography, sociology and anthropology/ethnography, as well as gender and queer studies, literature, and the arts. Contributions on communities that have historical, political, and cultural ties to Palestine are also of interest to the Journal.
Read more

ATTEND | Collective Action, and the Liberation of Palestine

Using the recently published JVC Palestine Portfolio as a springboard, contributors to this event will discuss collectives, collective action, artistic and political and social work, activism, and interventions in the service of the liberation of Palestine.

Event Contributors: Dr Rana Barakat (Director, BZU Museum, Birzeit University, West Bank, Palestine); Visualizing Palestine; Palestinian Feminist Collective; Decolonize This Place; and Dr Stephen Sheehi (Professor of Arabic Studies, William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia).

JVC Palestine Portfolio Contributors: Larissa Sansour, Rashid Khalidi, Mazen Kerbaj, The Mosaic Rooms, Strike MoMA, Ariella Azoulay, Danah Abdulla, Rounwah Adly Riyadh Bseiso, Hanan Toukan, Zeina Maasri, Adrian Lahoud and Jasbir K. Puar, Yoav Galai, Distributed Cognition Cooperative (Anna Engelhardt and Sasha Shestakova), Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Firas Shehadeh, Sami Khatib, Léopold Lambert/The Funambulist, Tina Sherwell, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Rochelle Davis and Dan Walsh, Lina Hakim, Ariel Caine, Nida Sinnokrot/Sakiya, Yara Sharif, Visualizing Palestine, Nada Dalloul, Simone Browne, Rehab Nazzal, Lila Sharif, Oraib Toukan and Mohmoud M Alshaer, Mark Muhannad Ayyash, Omar Kholeif, Oreet Ashery, The Palestinian Museum, Kareem Estefan and Nour Bishouty, Ghaith Hilal Nassar, Adam Broomberg, Kamal Aljafari, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Palestinian Feminist Collective, W.J.T. Mitchell, Dar El-Nimer for Arts and Culture, Jill H. Casid, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Stephen Sheehi, Susan Greene, Sunaina Maira, and Shourideh C. Molavi and Eyal Weizman.