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.
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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.

CONGRATS | 2021 American Anthropological Association’s Middle East Section Book Award Goes to Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins for 'Waste Siege' (Stanford, 2019)

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.

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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.