The Columbia Global Emerging Scholars Fellowship Program provides opportunities for early-career scholars — who hold refugee status or have been forcibly displaced — to enhance their research capabilities, broaden professional networks, and support their reintegration into academia in the humanities and/or humanistic social sciences. Following a successful four-year pilot program in Amman from 2020 to 2023, the Mellon Foundation expanded the program to the Global Centers in Amman, Nairobi and Santiago in 2024, with a generous grant for annual fellowships for the next three years.
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.
