WATCH | Final set of LOVE & INTIMACY videos

We are happy to share the final set of interviews for the LOVE & INTIMACY video project. The LOVE & INTIMACY series is part of 'Palestine, IN-BETWEEN', a Center for Palestine Studies x LIFTA collaboration. These short films 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.

This week we share conversations held between Marah and Hafsa, Tamara and Faiza, Serene and Nayrouz, and Sharon and Lilly. We’d like to thank all who participated in this series for your time, energy, and openness. You can watch the videos and follow the series on palestineinbetween.com, a blog and accompanying website to this program. All videos are made available on YouTube. A special thank you to Muna Daher for editing these videos, and Lena Mansour for Arabic to English translation.

'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.

Intro graphic by Ashay Bhave.

CALL | Abstracts for conference "Reassessing the British Mandate in Palestine"

Call for Papers: Reassessing the British Mandate in Palestine
Birzeit University, New Directions in Palestine Studies, Brown University, Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University, European Centre for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter, Centre for Palestine Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and Institute for Palestine Studies call for papers for the upcoming conference, “Reassessing the British Mandate in Palestine.”

The British Mandate (1922-1948) represents over a quarter-century in the modern history of Palestine during which the groundwork was laid for the usurpation of Palestinian political rights and the establishment of a Zionist state. It is a glaring instance of a colonial enterprise expressly designed to disenfranchise indigenous peoples conducted under the umbrella of international legitimacy. It is also the first and last time in modern history that the whole of Palestine has existed as a single polity, bringing together Palestinian Arabs and Jews, natives and settlers, and colonized and colonizers, within one political-legal framework, albeit on radically unequal terms. The hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Mandate is an apt occasion to revisit and reassess it as an episode in the history of Palestine.

The conference is provisionally scheduled for October 2022 and is planned to be held in a hybrid format, with an in-person component in Palestine, circumstances permitting. Abstracts of approximately 300 words should be submitted for blind review, in English or Arabic, to the following email address: conference@palestine-studies.org.

For more info, click here.

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.