Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins’ first book Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford, 2019) has won the 2021 American Anthropological Association’s Middle East Section (MES) Book Award, which is the second major award the book has received. “Waste Siege exemplifies ethnography’s capacity to mediate between the universal and the particular and between the global and the local,” writes the prize committee to her. “You offer a riveting and theoretically capacious engagement with the infrastructural, environmental, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of waste, all the while problematizing the boundaries implied by these categories. The ethnography’s meticulous attention to empirical detail, coupled with expansive multidisciplinary framing, make it a ‘must-read’ across domains of expertise and disciplinary commitments. The committee was especially struck by your subtle yet insistent commitment to documenting devastating and mundane dimensions of life under Occupation while also positioning Palestine as a lens for understanding worldwide and human dilemmas in the face of environmental collapse.” She will be celebrated at the MES business meeting and awards ceremony.
The Middle East Section Book Award is awarded biennially to an anthropological work (single- or multi-authored, but not edited volumes) that speaks to issues in a way that holds relevance beyond our subfield. Criteria may include: innovative approaches, theoretical sophistication, and topical originality.
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bard College. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. Sophia spoke about her book Waste Siege with Brian Boyd as part of the Center’s Palestine Library programming in February 2020.
ATTEND | An Introduction to Data Storytelling with Visualizing Palestine
Join Visualizing Palestine for a workshop on Data Storytelling, part of the 2021 BuildPalestine Summit, October 1-2, 2021.
Visualizing Palestine creates data-led, visual resources to advance a factual, rights-based narrative of Palestine and Palestinians. In this session, a VP researcher and a designer will offer a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of a recent visual, "4 Wars Old: 14 Years of Childhood in Gaza", sharing insight into how VP's work is made.
Learn more about this session and others and register here.
CONGRATS | Paola Cossermelli Messina Selected as the Public Humanities Radio Play Fellow
Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University and the Center for Palestine Studies Welcome Paola Cossermelli Messina as the 2021-2022 Public Humanities Radio Play Fellow!
Paola Cossermelli Messina is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University in the early stages of her dissertation exploring music, identity and diaspora in and between Lebanon and Brazil. She holds a B.A. in Music and Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.A. in Media Studies from The New School, with a specialization in sound. Her Master's thesis on the oral histories of Iranian women musicians was awarded a Middle East Studies Association's Graduate Student Paper Prize in 2016. Her most recent thesis and project, an experimental ethnography on a jukebox in a lesbian bar, was presented at Harvard's 2021 Graduate Music Forum. A sound designer and audio engineer by trade, she has worked in film and podcasts, and for the past 5 years has produced and edited the Arab Studies Institute's podcast الوضع. She teaches audio workshops at Sarah Lawrence College and, prior to pursuing her PhD, was the Project Manager for CUNY-Creative Arts Team's program Sound Thinking NYC, a free summer intensive for NYC high schoolers interested in careers in music production and audio engineering. She has been a Mason Endowed Fellow (2020-21) and was selected by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities and the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University as the 2021-22 Public Humanities Radio Play Fellow.
About the Public Humanities Graduate Fellowships at SOF/Heyman Center
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities provides funded opportunities for graduate students to explore the public dimensions of their work. While each fellowship has distinct features and requirements, during the funding period, students work closely with at least one community organization, participate in methods workshops, and present their projects in the Building Publics series.
To learn more about the Center's NO PLACE | LA MAKAN | لا مكان program, including information about this season's commissioned playwrights, ancillary programing and partners, click here.
NO PLACE | LA MAKAN | لا مكان is a project of the Center for Palestine Studies produced in partnership with the A. M. Qattan Foundation, with support from Taawon, The Tides Foundation, and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.
ATTEND | Walaa Alqaisiya - Queer Feminism in Palestine Event on 10/01/21
Friday, October 1, 2021
12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Virtual Event
Registration required
This talk will draw on Walaa Alqaisiya’s work with Palestinian queer grassroots activism to discuss the political and conceptual urgency of centering settler-colonialism to gender and sexuality issues in the context of Palestine, the MENA region, and beyond. In doing so, the talk will take the recent uprising and political events in Palestine as a prism to view and understand the context and historical location of Palestinian queer feminist organizing and the decolonial lens they advance. This talk is organized and hosted by the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University.
Walaa Alqaisiya is an associate researcher at the Middle East Centre, London School of Economics (LSE), and Council for British Research in the Levant. Previously, she worked as an external collaborator at the European University Institute on the Libya Initiative Project. She received her PhD in Human Geography from Durham University in 2018. Her research examines the transformative political potential of everyday activism and aesthetics in the ambit of gender and sexuality in Palestine. Starting in 2022, she will be a Marie Curie Global Fellow at Columbia University, Ca ’Foscari University of Venice, and the London School of Economics where she will examine the relationship between environmental and gendered politics across multiple contexts of indigeneity.
APPLY | PARC Announces 2022-2023 Research Fellowships and Travel Seminar Competitions
PARC 2022-2023 Research Fellowships and Travel Seminar Competitions
PARC announces its 10th National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions (FPIRI) competition for field-based research in Palestine in the humanities or research that embraces a humanistic approach and methods. Applicants must be scholars who have earned their PhD or completed their professional training. Applicants must be U.S. citizens or have lived in the United States for the last three years. Fellowship awards are $5,000 per month for a minimum of four up to a maximum of ten months of research. Applications are due January 10, 2022.
PARC announces its 23rd annual U.S. research fellowship competition for research that will contribute to Palestinian studies. Applicants must be doctoral students or scholars who have earned their PhD and must be U.S. citizens. Any field of research will be considered, including the arts, humanities, social sciences, economics, law, public health, and applied sciences. Fellowship awards are up to a maximum of $9,000. Research must take place in Palestine, Israel, Jordan, or Lebanon. Applications are due January 3, 2022.
PARC announces its 23rd annual Palestinian research fellowship competition for research in the humanities and social sciences that will contribute to Palestinian Studies. Applicants must be Palestinian doctoral students or Palestinian scholars who have earned their PhD. Applicants may apply regardless of their country of residence or ID. Research must take place in Palestine, Jordan, or Lebanon. Fellowship awards up to a maximum of $6,000. Applications are due November 22, 2021.
PARC announces its 13th annual Faculty Development Seminar (FDS) on Palestine competition for U.S. faculty members with a demonstrated interest in, but little travel experience to, Palestine. Applicants may come from any field of study. The program will host 10 to 12 U.S. faculty members to participate in roundtable discussions; visits to Palestinian universities, research institutes, and cultural institutions; tours of historic cities; as well as meetings with Palestinian colleagues. Applicants may apply for two program dates, May 19 - May 31, 2022 or June 16 - June 28, 2022, in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Applications are due December 20, 2021.
For complete information on these fellowships, visit PARC's website at http://parc-us-pal.org.
CAORC Multi-Country Research Fellowship
The Multi-Country Research Fellowship enables US scholars to carry out trans-regional and comparative research in countries across the network of Overseas Research Centers (ORCs), as well as other countries. The fellowship supports advanced research in the humanities, social sciences, and allied natural sciences for US doctoral candidates and scholars who have earned their PhD. Scholars must carry out research in two or more countries outside the US, at least one of which must host a participating ORC (PARC is one of the qualifying ORCs for this fellowship). Approximately nine awards of $11,500 will be granted. The deadline for applications is November 16, 2021. To apply for this opportunity, click here.
CONGRATS | Tareq Awwad Visiting Fellow at CGC | Amman Translates GS Alumnus’ Revolutionary Harris Matrix
The Harris Matrix, invented by alumnus Dr. Edward Cecil Harris ’71GS, continues to play an important role in archaeology, and has recently been translated into Arabic by Baraa Seraj Eddin and Tareq Awwad, a visiting fellow at the Columbia Global Center in Amman. Learn more about The Harris Matrix here.
Awwad, who worked on the Arabic translation of the book, is an archaeologist with an MA in the Ancient Near East from the Lebanese University and a BA in archaeology from Damascus University. Awwad has diverse research interests in archaeological methodology and public archeology. He participated in archaeological excavations in Syria and Lebanon with several institutes, including the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums of Syria, the Institut Français du Proche-Orient, and the University of Balamand. He was also involved in archaeological surveys in 2019 with the Honor Frost Foundation.
Currently, Awwad is a 2021-2022 visiting fellow at the Columbia Global Center in Amman. His research explores the nature of the relationship between Syrian communities and archeological sites and the historical, political, economic, and current societal views on the issue of archeology. His research is being mentored by Dr. Brian Boyd of Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology.
Read the full announcement on the School of General Studies website, here.
WATCH | New LOVE & INTIMACY videos from 'Palestine, IN-BETWEEN'
Intro graphic by Ashay Bhave
WEEK 4:
AYA & NADA
In this episode, we meet Aya, 22, and Nada, 22. Aya is a Palestinian-American who grew up in the US and Jordan, and Nada is Palestinian-Emirati and grew up in the UAE. The duo met at NYU Abu Dhabi, where this interview takes place. Interviewing each other, they discuss how you know you're Palestinian if you've never been, the decision and narrative around removing the hijab, reputation as a limitation of love, how community love and independence complement each other, prioritizing mental health, chosen family, and pleasure beyond sexual satisfaction.
NADA & HANA
In this episode, we meet Nada, 24, and Hana, 24. Nada and Hana grew up in Amman together and share a 16-year friendship. Interviewing each other, they discuss being Palestinian and never having visited Palestine, claiming their Palestinianness in diaspora, the challenges of finding community outside of Jordan, the hardest part of themselves to love, confronting pain and discomfort to heal generational trauma, and how their families view love and intimacy across generations.
As part of 'Palestine, IN-BETWEEN', we present the LOVE & INTIMACY video series. Over the course of the next several weeks, we’ll be releasing short films that center intergenerational outlooks on love and intimacy in Palestine and the diaspora, with discussions highlighting—but not limited to— disconnects, desires, relationships, trauma, teaching, learning, and beyond. This series includes intimate interviews and conversations held between Palestinians who share a close relationship, including old friends, parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, lovers, cousins, and more.
Conversations explore what has been inherited and what is being shed, as well as the ways in which taking care of ourselves and each other is to care for the collective—now and into the future. Dialogue moves beyond topics of love in the human-to-human sense, extending to the deep connections one shares with an object, time, smell, memory, land, and ritual.
For descriptions and links to all of the videos in this series, click here.
'Palestine, IN-BETWEEN' is presented by CPS + LIFTA with Lena Mansour and Cher Asad with support from The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Center for Archaeology at Columbia University and the Columbia Global Center | Amman.
READ | "Pedagogies of Becoming" by Naye Idriss, Columbia '20
Graffiti of Ghassan Kanafani outside the Ghassan Kanafani Cultural Center in Beddawi refugee camp, Lebanon.
What can Palestinian children living in the refugee camps learn about the meaning and practice of resistance from reading an indigenous canon?
“Pedagogies of Becoming” is an except of Naye Idriss’s senior thesis which won the 2020 MES Graduate Student Paper Prize.
Naye Idriss graduated from Columbia University in 2020 with a double-majored in Comparative Literature and Anthropology. In Fall 2021, she will begin her MA in Near Eastern Studies at NYU’s Hagop Kevorkian Center.
Citation:
Idriss, Naye. 2021. “Pedagogies of Becoming.” Anthropology News website, August 26, 2021.