CPS congratulates Nate George on his appointment as Lecturer in Politics of the Middle East, Department of Politics and International Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London!
Nate was the 2020-2021 Ibrahim Abu-Lughod fellow at CPS. Recently, he was the 2021-2022 Raphael Morrison Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow, at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Nate holds a PhD in History from Rice University.
CPS congratulates faculty member Gil Z. Hochberg for winning the 2022 René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association for her monograph, Becoming Palestine (Duke University Press, 2021)!
Gil is the Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Visual Studies, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University and a core faculty member of CPS.
The René Wellek Prizes recognize outstanding books in the discipline of comparative literature. Submissions can pertain to any field of comparative literature, but they are expected to cross national, linguistic, geographic or disciplinary borders.
For more info about the award, click here.
Fore more info about Becoming Palestine, click here.
The Institute for Palestine Studies is proud to present The Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question, which it has been developing as part of a joint project with the Palestinian Museum.
The fully bilingual (English–Arabic) platform is entirely devoted to the history of modern Palestine, from the end of the Ottoman era to the present. The Encyclopedia, the first of its kind, was developed for use by academics, students, journalists, and the general public. It currently consists of the following sections:
An Overall Chronology that presents the main events and developments that shaped Palestinian modern history in the realms of war, diplomacy, politics, culture, and economy;
Thematic Chronologies, or subsets of the Overall Chronology, that facilitate access to entries relevant to specific topics;
Highlights, written by leading academics and experts in the field, that cover important events and institutions, political, military and legal-constitutional developments, as well as crucial aspects of Palestinian cultural, social, or economic life or experience;
Biographies of Palestinian intellectuals, artists, leaders, combatants, and politicians who have influenced the history of Palestine since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries;
Places, the digitized version of the seminal book All That Remains, dedicated to the 418 Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948;
Documents, consisting of hundreds of primary texts, photographs, maps, and charts.
The Encyclopedia has come to fruition following years of preparation and several stages of implementation. Throughout this process, utmost attention has been given to introduce a description of the Palestine Question that is simultaneously committed and objective and to present Palestinians as they are—purposeful actors, and not just victims, who build with both successes and setbacks their political, social, and cultural institutions inside and outside Palestine.
The Encyclopedia will be continually upgraded and populated with additional content. To help improve it further, send feedback and suggestions to: palquest@palestine-studies.org.
CPS congratulates Hadeel Assali on her appointment as Postdoctoral Scholar at Columbia’s Center for Science and Society. Hadeel will teach an interdisciplinary graduate course, Seminar in Race, Climate Change, and Environmental Justice, in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and will start a new research project tentatively focused on the scientific and social aspects of waterways.
Hadeel is currently an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Pennsylvania and a former chemical engineer with nearly 10 years of experience with a major oil corporation. She also holds an affiliation with the University of Houston. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology at Columbia University. Her dissertation, titled "Prophecies of Palestine: Geology and Intimate Knowledge of the Subterranean" explores the colonial legacies of geology in southern Palestine. She is also a filmmaker working on her first feature-length documentary.
With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Columbia Global Centers | Amman has established the Mellon Fellowship Program to support emerging displaced scholars working in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. The goal of the program is to create opportunities for scholars to reintegrate into academia and resume their academic pursuits.
Eligible candidates are scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who have been forcibly uprooted from their home countries and respected academic institutions. They could be graduate students who have had their education disrupted or post-doctoral scholars in the early stages of their careers. Creative writers, artists, and curators may also apply.
Call for applications
Arabic
English
Applicants for the fellowship starting January 2023 must submit applications by 2 July 2022.
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (with videographer Ali Al-Deek), Waste Underground, 2017. 14:40 minutes, HD video. Copyright: Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins.
Waste Underground by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (with videographer Ali Al-Deek) is available online in e-flux Issue #127 (May 2022) along with a roundtable discussion on “Toxic Politics of Waste” with Hanna Baumann, Adriana Massidda, Bassem Saad, Elizabeth Saleh, and Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins.
This group discussion explores how politics, toxicity, and subjectivities intersect, and highlights the role of film as a medium for approaching these subjects. The management of waste and the experiences of its toxic afterlives are riddled with uncertainty. How can we make sense of toxicity’s different temporalities and the entanglements of human and nonhuman entities it creates? More specifically, how can different forms of art and knowledge-production account for the often invisible trajectories of waste, its slow and difficult-to-trace effects, and the complexity of the political forces at play?
Hanna Baumann, Adriana Massidda, and Elizabeth Saleh were joined by the makers of two short films. Waste Underground (15’, 2017), by anthropologist Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins and cinematographer Ali al-Deek, explores a landfill in the West Bank as underground storage space through the lens of Palestinian futurity. Kink Retrograde (19’, 2019), by artist and writer Bassem Saad, is set on a landfill on the Lebanese coast in the midst of the country’s ongoing waste crisis. Due to the places where these films are situated, the discussion focuses on questions of waste in Palestine and Lebanon, but also considers these particular situations in the context of global circulations and broader questions around the politics of toxicity.
CPS celebrates the publication of a new article co-authored by Wassim Ghantous, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow 2021-2022.
”Dromoelimination: Accelerating settler colonialism in Palestine”
By Wassim Ghantous and Mikko Joronen
This paper examines the eliminatory speed of Israeli settler colonialism, particularly the ways in which settler organizations aim to accelerate the pace of elimination at the colonial frontiers in Palestine. We show, by focusing on the settler NGO Regavim, how such settler entrepreneurs constantly develop new techniques that challenge the slow and creeping eliminatory pace of state’s administrative, legal and security bodies with an intensifying eliminatory speed we call ‘dromoelimination’. By closely elaborating the ongoing events in the West Bank village of Susiya, we argue that dromoelimination operates, firstly, through accelerative state-settler dynamics that traverses beyond the eliminatory functions of the state while at the same time fundamentally reconfiguring them; and secondly, by turning Palestinian life and struggle against dispossession, forced displacement and destruction increasingly vulnerable to intensified temporalities of ‘depleting time’. Settler colonialism, we contend, becomes comprehensible in a more tangible, complex and spatially nuanced terms when looked through the speed and pace of its movement: that is, through intensified and accelerated eliminatory rhythms – of dromoelimination.
Full citation
Ghantous, Wassim, and Mikko Joronen. “Dromoelimination: Accelerating Settler Colonialism in Palestine.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Apr. 2022, doi:10.1177/02637758221090968.
THROUGH JUNE 26
MoMA
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s multipart project May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2020–ongoing) examines how communities bear witness to experiences of violence, loss, displacement, and forced migration. Since the early 2010s, Abbas and Abou-Rahme have collected online recordings of everyday people singing and dancing in communal spaces in Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen. The work brings digital traces of these performing bodies together with new performances created by the artists with dancer Rima Baransi and electronic musicians Haykal, Julmud, and Makimakkuk, working in Ramallah, Palestine. According to Abbas and Abou-Rahme, through song and dance, “these fractured communities are resisting their own erasure and laying claim to space, self, and collectivity once more.”
This evolving work, co-commissioned by MoMA and Dia Art Foundation, will be presented as an online platform and physical exhibition. The first part, titled Postscript: after everything is extracted, launched in December 2020, as part of Dia’s Artist Web Projects Series. In March 2022, Dia’s online platform was updated with the artists’ extensive collection of found online recordings and the original performances. The exhibition in MoMA’s Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio will bring the footage into the gallery through an immersive, multichannel sound and moving-image installation titled Only sounds that tremble through us.
May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth considers performance—whether in the form of song, spoken word, dance, or gesture—as a political act at a time marked by myriad forms of violence against entire communities.
For more info and timed tickets, visit MoMA’s website.
RELATED CPS EVENT
TUESDAY
26 April 2022
Join CMES, Brown University, MEI, Columbia University and CPS, Columbia University for an online conversation with Palestinian artists Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas. We will discuss their project "May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth" which examines how people are witness to and narrate experiences of violence, loss, erasure, displacement, and forced migration through performance. The conversation will also address Ruanne and Basel’s wider art practice which is at the intersection of performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality.
To register for the event, click here.