ATTEND | Virtual Gaza: Notes on Martial Design on 03/14/24

Middle Eastern Studies Program, Center for Human Rights and the Arts, and Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard College Present

Virtual Gaza: Notes on Martial Design
Thursday, March 14, 2024

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
Bard College
5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Ali Musleh, Columbia University Center for Palestine Studies

Siege warfare and occupation as conducted by the Israeli state are in permanent beta phase. AI-powered systems of targeting, remote and robotic weaponry, terraforming munitions, algorithmic governance, mass shock-and-awe assaults—these, among other forms of violence, are all treated as tests in an endless iterative loop. With each incursion into Palestinian lifeworlds, new terrains of intervention are opened up to the power and forces of design, from the nervous system of the occupied to the subterranean spaces of armed insurgency. With a focus on Gaza since the turn of the 21st Century, this talk explores design as a spirit of approach to settler-colonial warfare. It shows how conceptualizing design as war can offer new insights into settler colonialism’s virtual potential to generate new and emergent forms of horror. Imprisoned within Israel’s iterative design abyss, a virtual Gaza is formed and reformed without telos or end, one where the designers of armed violence give themselves up to an open-ended process of becoming with weapons that implicates the entirety of settler society.

Ali H. Musleh is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at the Columbia University Center for Palestine Studies. He is also associate researcher at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (UH-M) Hawaiʻi Research Center for Futures Studies. In 2022, he received his PhD from the Department of Political Science at UHM, where he taught global politics and political design and futuristics.

For more info, click here.

CALL | SOAS Centre for Palestine Studies 10th Annual Graduate Research Seminar Call for Papers

SOAS Centre for Palestine Studies 10th Annual Graduate Research Seminar Call for Papers

Recognizing the urgency of the study of Palestine amidst the ongoing genocide—including the destruction of the Palestinian educational sector and a widespread campaign to suppress solidarity with Palestine—the Centre for Palestine Studies announces the call forpapers for its 10th annual graduate research seminar, to be held on 6 June 2024 in hybrid format, at SOAS, University of London and online.
 
This research seminar provides a critical platform for PhD students and postdoctoral scholars working on Palestine or Palestine-related issues to present their projects, receive feedback, and engage others within a supportive environment. We welcome a broad range of topics, aiming at an interdisciplinary dialogue across Palestine Studies.

Panels will be organised around themes that emerge from the research submissions and will be assigned a discussant to respond. If you are interested in participating, please make a submission via the online form by 14 April 2024. 
 
A complete application will include a proposed title, an abstract of maximum 200 words, along with a brief bio. In your submission, please specify whether you plan to participate in-person or online.

For more info, click here. 
To submit a proposal, click here.

READ | "Abu Jubran and Jabal ʿAmil Between the Palestinian and Iranian Revolutions" by Nathaniel George

Nathaniel George has a chapter titled, “Abu Jubran and Jabal ʿAmil Between the Palestinian and Iranian Revolutions,” in the new volume The Fate of Third Worldism in the Middle East: Iran, Palestine, and Beyond, edited by Sune Haugbolle and Rasmus Elling (London: Oneworld Academic, 2024).

The chapter explores the history and development of the Lebanese-Palestinian resistance in south Lebanon, with a focus on the under-examined period of the late 1970s. It draws on microhistorical approaches to challenge a clear-cut declension narrative of the Lebanese National Movement-Palestine Liberation Organization (LNM-PLO) alliance by revisiting a largely repressed history of victory and contestation. It examines the trajectory of the Lebanese left primarily through a series of oral history interviews I conducted in rural south Lebanon with a longtime, influential, southern Lebanese communist. It also reflects upon on the transition between national and Islamic modes of anticolonial resistance.

Nathaniel George is Lecturer in Politics of the Middle East in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. He was the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies in academic year 2020-2021.

ATTEND | The world like a jewel in the hand 03/28/24

 

DATE
28 March 2024
4:00PM

VENUE
Wood Auditorium
Avery Hall

 

The world like a jewel in the hand travels over open books, looted objects and postcards to look for the imperial foundations of the world in which we live. Within this wide landscape it focuses on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world that existed in North Africa, making it imaginable and inhabitable again. Narrated in the first person, by an Algerian Jew and a Palestinian Jew, the film refuses imperial histories of those places.

Objects and images are held captive in museums and archives outside of the places from where they were looted are only the visible tip of the iceberg of the mass colonial plunder of Africa. This long and enduring ransack, cannot be addressed only through the discourse of restitution, especially when arguments are made in support of the restitution of individual objects; rather, it requires a questioning of the imperial foundations of the world in which we live. The film looks at them as part of the substantial wealth accumulated through the extraction of raw materials, labor, knowledge and skills, including the “visual wealth” attained by putting people in front of the colonizers’ cameras. Before the colonization of North Africa by the French, this was the world of my ancestors. The film insists on the right of descendants of the Jewish Muslim world to refuse to conceive this world, destroyed by the colonization of North Africa by the French and of Palestine by the Zionists, as over.

PARTICIPANTS
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Brown University. She teaches political theory from an anti-colonial perspective, using photography and material culture to study onto-epistemological violence in institutions and technologies like museums and archives. She is also an independent curator and a film essayist. Her books include: La résistance des bijoux (Rot-Bo-Krik, 2023). The Jewelers of the ummah – Algerian Letters (Verso 2024), Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso Books, 2019), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso Books, 2012), The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008), and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press, 2011). Among her films: The world like a jewel in the hand – Unlearning Imperial Plunder II (2023), Un-documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder I (2019) and Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47–48 (2012). Among her exhibitions: Errata (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2019; HKW, Berlin, 2020), and The Natural History of Rape (Berlin Biennale, 2022).

Samia Henni is a historian of the built, destroyed and imagined environments. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (gta Verlag 2017, 2022, EN; Editions B42, 2019, FR), and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (If I Can’t Dance, Framer Framed, edition fink, 2024), and the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022) and War Zones (gta Verlag, 2018). She is also the maker of exhibitions, such as Performing Colonial Toxicity (Framer Framed, If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam, 2023–04), Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, Charlottesville, 2017–22), Archives: Secret-Défense? (ifa Gallery, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2021), and Housing Pharmacology (Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020). Samia was an invited tutor at the first-ever Biennale College Architettura 2023 at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, “The Laboratory of the Future,” at Venice Architecture Biennale. She received her PhD in the history and theory of architecture (with distinction, ETH Medal) from ETH Zurich and has taught at Princeton university, ETH Zurich, Geneva University of Art and Design, and Cornell University. Currently, she is an invited Visiting Professor at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich, and the co-chair of the University Seminar “Beyond France” at Columbia University. In the fall of 2024, Samia will join the faculty of McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture in Montreal.

Jude Abdelqader is a doctoral student in Architecture at Columbia GSAPP. Her work explores indigenous spatial approaches to self-determination and histories of architectural modernisms in Palestine. Jude received a Bachelor in Architecture from the Technion Institute in Haifa, and a Masters in Architecture and Historic Urban Environments from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, as a Saïd-Chevening partner scholar. Prior to pursuing doctoral studies, she gained professional experience working at Senan Architects and co-founded the Ehna Hein project in Taybe

ATTEND | Speak, O Stone w/ Khaled Jarrar 03/27/24

Join MESAAS for the first event in a series of talks/performances curated by Gil Hochberg:

"MESAAS Hosting Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Artists"  

Artist Khaled Jarrar 

Speak, O Stone.

A child's dream to be a pilot, making little objects from stones with a knowledge that he learned from an ex Palestinian prisoner. Reflections on militarism, bodies, masculinity, performance art, space, time,childhood, dreaming, home seeking and death.

March 27, Knox Hall 403, 4-6pm. 

ATTEND | Technology and (Anti) Colonialism on 03/04/24

UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences will host, Technology and (Anti)Colonialism, on March 4, at 4pm.

Panelists: Zaid Shuaibi, Nour AbuZaid, and Majd Shehabi, Helga Tawil-Souri, Ali H.Musleh

Moderator: Gina Dent and Jumana Abbas

This event is organized by Al-Haq FAI Unit as part of the programming for They Are Shooting at Our Shadows, their debut exhibition.

This event is online. REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED.

Zaid Shuaibi is the Arab World and Palestine Coordinator for the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)

Nour AbuZaid is an architect and advanced researcher at Forensic Architecture, conducting spatial research and creating computational tools for automation and visualisation. In her role as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) liaison, she teaches FA research methodologies to collaborators in the region. She works on developing publicly accessible (web-based) research tools to disseminate to non-expert actors on the ground and support grassroots activism.

Majd Shehabi is a systems design engineer, based in Beirut. He works with a wide range of academic and cultural institutions and archives in the region to build openness into their information systems. His most recent project is Palestine Open Maps, a platform for open sourcing historical maps of Palestine.

Helga Tawil-Souri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU. Helga’s work deals with spatiality, technology, infrastructure and politics in the Middle East, with a focus on contemporary Palestine.

 Ali H. Musleh is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. His research explores how weapons make the worlds of war we inhabit. At CPS, he is working on his first book manuscript, To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth, on the automation of settler colonialism in Palestine. Musleh is also Associate Researcher at the Hawaiʻi Research Center for Futures Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (UH-M).

APPLY | Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellowship Application Cycle 2024-25

We are pleased to announce that the competition for 
the 2024-2025 Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Award is now open!


The Ibrahim Abu-Lughod 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.

The competition is open to all 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. Special consideration will be given to projects that focus on Gaza this cycle.

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.


Applications are due on March 4, 2024.