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.

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.
Read more

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.