ATTEND | Theory from Below: Family Museums as Spaces of Knowledge Production and Epistemological Resistance in Palestine, w/ Mazen Iwaisi, 12/15/25

Theory from Below: Family Museums as Spaces of Knowledge Production and Epistemological Resistance in Palestine

This intervention examines how local Palestinian communities embody "theory in action" through family-based museums, challenging traditional museological frameworks and institutional practices. Drawing from ethnographic research on three family museums in the West Bank, I discuss how these grassroots initiatives represent a form of theory in action that emerges organically from community needs rather than institutional mandates. These museums operate as living experiences where theoretical concepts of heritage preservation, cultural memory, and community engagement are tested, adapted, and reimagined through daily practice.

The analysis reveals how family museums function as sites of epistemological resistance, deploying strategies that transcend mere preservation. These museums actively challenge hegemonic knowledge production systems of colonial archaeology by legitimizing local epistemologies that have been systematically marginalized. Through meticulous documentation of family histories and material culture, they directly confront Israeli settler-colonial narratives of terra nullius landscapes. By establishing autonomous spaces for knowledge production beyond the quasi-state apparatus and NGO networks, these museums engage in what I call 'epistemic disobedience.' Their approaches to preservation, curation, and community engagement generate theoretical innovations that emerge from lived experiences of resistance to dispossession - not as abstract academic exercises but as urgent responses to ongoing cultural erasure and spatial eradication.

By focusing on how theory emerges from practice in these settings, this intervention proposes a more grounded understanding of "theory in action" - one that recognizes local communities as theoretical innovators rather than just practitioners. This work contributes to broader discussions about decolonial museum practices, community-based heritage management, and the role of families in generating new theoretical frameworks for cultural preservation. The goal is to demonstrate how family museums represent not just the application of theory but the active creation of theoretical knowledge through lived experience and daily practice.

More info here.

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Mazen Iwaisi is a Palestinian archaeologist whose work is focused on the geopolitics of Palestinian archaeology practice and theory. He has obtained his PhD from Queen's University Belfast on the concept of archaeo-politics in the making of the Palestinian National Spatial Plan — his research centres on archaeology and cultural heritage and how they relate to spatial and urban planning.

S26 COURSE | From Ruins to Remains: Palestine & Archaeology w/ Brian Boyd

Anth GR5555 From Ruins to Remains: Palestine & Archaeology

“The ruins of Gaza will be the archaeology of the future” (Iwaisi & Barghouth 2023)

This course reexamines the idea of “ruins” in Palestine, reframing them as “remains” - material, social, and cultural presences that persist despite efforts of erasure by colonial, national, or ideological forces. Students will explore how archaeology, often misrepresented as a quest for ‘discoveries’, is always deeply entangled with politics, nationalism, colonialism, and cultural appropriation in Southwest Asia. The course emphasizes ‘remains’ rather than ‘ruins’, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s idea of fragments as revitalized pieces of the past. It traces European imaginaries from the classical writings of Josephus and others, through the medieval Crusades, to the 17 th and 18 th centuries, when the depiction and representation of a romanticized past of ‘biblical’ landscapes was vividly created by European writers, artists and cartographers. These Orientalist perspectives were formalized in the 1870s with the region’s mapping by the British Survey of Western Palestine (1871-77) – a meticulous survey of the ‘biblical’ places in Palestine. The map that resulted from this survey was subsequently used as the basis for the partition plan by the British government which took over southern Palestine from the Ottoman administration in 1917 (the British Mandate), and was also used as the base map to create the political boundaries of the state of Israel, established in 1947/8, involving the displacement of 750 000 Palestinians from more than 400 villages across the region. The materiality of the Nakba remains across the landscapes of contemporary Palestine and Israel, standing as an evidential archive. We will consider how the notion of ‘remains’ articulates with settler colonial appropriation of archaeological narratives that seek to keep evidence for a Palestinian presence in the landscapes of the region firmly in the past – as ‘ruins’.

ATTEND | 'Our Genocide,' a discussion w/ B'Tselem, 11/19/25

A discussion of the recently published report, 'Our Genocide' by The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B'tselem. Speakers Yuli Novak and Kareem Jubran will be joined by Professor Diana Greenwald to discuss the research and its significance in the fight against genocide in Palestine.

This event is organized by the Middle East Institute and co-sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Human Rights. For more info + to register, click here.

ATTEND | Chronic Erasure w/ Mazen Iwaisi, 11/12/25

Chronic Erasure: Reflection on Archive, Curation, and Storage in Palestine under Israeli Settler Colonialism

Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Bertelsmann Campus Center
Weis Cinema
Bard College

Mazen Iwaisi's research examines how Israeli settler colonialism operates through archaeological archival practices to disrupt Palestinian presence and state-building processes. Employing institutional ethnography and archival analysis, he investigates how archives become sites of contestation between colonial erasure and Palestinian institutional development. Israeli settler colonialism undermines Palestinian heritage institutions through "chronic erasure"—manipulating temporal frameworks that destroy present Palestinian connections whilst fabricating alternative Israeli narratives. Palestinian state-building efforts resist these processes through institutional archaeology, creating archives that assert sovereignty and cultural continuity despite occupation.

Cases from Gaza's emergency artefact preservation and West Bank excavations reveal how Palestinian archival practices embody resistance, establishing knowledge infrastructures whilst confronting colonial dispossession. The Palestinian Department of Antiquities exemplifies this tension, navigating resource constraints and political limitations whilst building institutional capacity for heritage preservation. This demonstrates how Palestinian archival work transcends documentation, functioning as state-building acts that assert Palestinian historical presence while constructing institutional frameworks for cultural preservation and national continuity. These practices counter settler colonial temporality by maintaining Palestinian cultural memory against systematic erasure.
 

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Curatorial Studies, the Human Rights Project and the Anthropology program at Bard College.

ATTEND | The Part which Has Two Parts w/ Aamer Ibraheem, 11/6/25

Join the Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities
for a talk by Aamer Ibraheem, chaired by Karuna Mantena

The Part which Has Two Parts: Reincarnation, Sovereignty, and Implicated Subjects in the Golan Heights

Thursday, November 6
12:15-2pm

Second Floor Common Room
Heyman Center

This talk presents an ethnography of the contradictory and often brutal experience of the self under a political condition marked by the excess of state sovereignty. It is an ethnography that enters the inner worlds of those living on the mountains of the Golan Heights—a post-war landscape shaped by the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War. In this occupied zone, a population of over twenty-five thousand Druze sees its history claimed and interpellated by the Syrian state, past and present, while being saturated with Israeli rule and political logic. At the heart of this sovereign conjuncture stands the powerful and pervasive reincarnated figure: men and women who recall their vivid past-life memories, but whose memories belong to histories that contradict and often trouble the present in the here and now. This talk attends ethnographically to this figure and sets out to understand the notion of the “implicated subject,” exploring how people and communities find themselves folded into events and social dramas that are far larger than themselves.

Aamer Ibraheem is a sociocultural anthropologist, whose research weaves anthropology with history in multiple languages including Arabic, Hebrew, and French, to study the formation of political attachments and the production of historical claims among mountain communities in the modern Middle East, with a focus on the realms of war, self, and theology. His work centers on questions around the colonial registers of tradition and their temporal modes of subjection. His current book project, Present Interruptus, traces how the Druze tradition of reincarnation was inaugurated as an anthropological object of knowledge external to the community since the 19th century. Located in the Golan Heights, this ethnography proposes a radical rethinking of past-life memories by taking seriously the politically paradoxical subject positions they produce.
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The SOF/ Heyman Center Fall Thursday Lecture Series events are open to Columbia-affiliated faculty, students, and invited guests. All others interested in attending, please email the SOF/Heyman at sofheyman@columbia.edu.

ATTEND | Lecture by Omer Bartov, 11/11/25

Join the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race,
in partnership with GSAPP, the Department of History, and the European Institute for a talk by Omer Bartov.

Tuesday, November 11
7-8:30PM

Wood Auditorium
Avery Hall

This lecture will provide a gist of Bartov's forthcoming book, Israel: What Went Wrong?, to be published in April 2026. The book explores the tragic transformation of Zionism, a movement that sought to emancipate European Jewry from oppression, into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism. How is it possible that a state founded in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, an event that gave legitimacy to a national home for the Jews, stands credibly accused of perpetrating large-scale war crimes? How do we come to terms with the fact that Israel’s war of destruction is being conducted with the support, laced with denial and indifference, of so many of its Jewish citizens? Tracing the roots of the violent events currently unfolding in Israel and the occupied territories, the book tracks Israel’s moral tribulations and considers the origins of Zionism; the intertwining of its independence with Palestinian displacement; the politics of the Holocaust; controversies over the term "genocide"; and the uncertain future. 

Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American scholar and Dean’s Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. He has written widely on war crimes, interethnic relations, and genocide. Recent books, published in multiple languages, include Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018), which won the National Jewish Book Award, and Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis (2023), named Choice 2024 Outstanding Academic Title. Bartov’s essays and commentaries have been widely featured in national and international magazines and media outlets. His new book, Israel: What Went Wrong?, will be published in April 2026 by FSG in the US and Penguin/Random Books in the UK, as well as in several European languages and in Chinese. Bartov's novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, was published in 2023 in the United States and Israel. 

Please note that any questions about this program should be addressed to the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, the event organizer.

ATTEND | Unerasable Narratives at People's Forum, 10/29/25

DATE
October 29, 2025
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

VENUE
The People’s Forum
320 West 37th Street
New York, NY 10018 United States

Join Visualizing Palestine at The People’s Forum on Wednesday, October 29th at 6:30pm in conversation with writer and illustrator, Mona Chalabi, and researcher and author, Tareq Baconi to discuss the role of research and design in shifting the narrative on Palestine amidst a rapidly changing information landscape.

Focusing on storytelling and concrete tools and methods to resource movement partners, Mona and Tareq will be joined by VP’s information designer, Nasreen Abd Elal. Jessica Anderson and Aline Batarseh, co-editors of Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation, will provide opening remarks.

Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation will be available for purchase, and we encourage you to pre-order Tareq’s forthcoming book, Fire in Every Direction, expected in November.

Please note, this event is not organized by the Center for Palestine Studies or Columbia University. Any questions about the event should be addressed to the host, the People’s Forum.