APPLY | 2024-2025 Tanya Baker-Asad Scholarship for Palestinian Women Pursuing PhDs

The Palestinian American Research Center announces the inauguration of The Tanya Baker-Asad Scholarship for Palestinian women pursuing PhDs in the humanities and social sciences. The Scholarship was established in honor of the late Tanya Baker-Asad, an anthropologist, a feminist, and a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause. A woman of great integrity and compassion, and with a strong sense of justice, Tanya Baker-Asad was a researcher and a teacher who remained steadfast in her commitment to improving the lives of women, particularly those living under conditions of hardship and political repression. The Tanya Baker-Asad Scholarship was established by Baker-Asad’s husband, Talal Asad. 

Qualified applicants should either be enrolled or in the process of enrolling in a doctoral program in the humanities or social sciences at an accredited university anywhere in the world. The maximum Scholarship award for academic year 2024/2025 is $25,000, while the duration of the award is for one year. The Scholarship may be used for any expenses related to the pursuit of the degree (e.g. tuition, research expenses, dissertation write-up support, living expenses). 

Information about this competition:

  • Applicants must be women of Palestinian heritage.

  • Applicants must be scholars enrolled, or in the process of enrolling in a PhD  program at an accredited university anywhere in the world. 

  • Fields of study include, but are not limited to, anthropology, sociology, economics, history, philosophy, religious studies, political science, psychology, geography, literature, languages and linguistics, archaeology, art history, media studies, and film studies.

  • The Scholarship can be used for any expenses related to the pursuit of the degree (e.g. tuition, research expenses, dissertation write-up support, living expenses).

Applications due January 8, 2024 | Awards announced April 18, 2024

For complete information, visit PARC’s website at https://www.parc-us-pal.org.

     
 The Tanya Baker-Asad Scholarship is supported by
the Tanya Baker-Asad Fund

ATTEND | Bisan Lecture Series w/ Rashid Khalidi on 10/11/23

The Latest Phase of the Hundred Years’ War on Palestine
Online | 12pm New York

For over a century, Palestine has been the scene of a war meant to wrest the country from its indigenous population. This war was waged by a settler-colonial movement with the unstinting backing, and sometimes the participation of, outside powers. Enormous discursive efforts have been exerted to obfuscate the basic nature of this struggle, and to present it solely in its religious, national and other dimensions. Faced with an ongoing and relentless process of dispossession, and with their very existence as a people threatened, the Palestinians have resisted against tremendous odds.  This war may be entering a new phase, with an aggressive Israeli regime still fully supported by the US openly committed to completing the settler colonial project, but meeting mounting Palestinian defiance and growing global condemnation of its openly supremacist and racist nature.

Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. He received a B.A. from Yale University and a D. Phil. from Oxford University, and has previously taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, and the University of Chicago. He is co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies and has served as President of the Middle East Studies Association. He is the author of eight books, most recently The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017, and of over 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, and has co-edited three books.

ATTEND | Edward W. Said London Lecture 2023: Francesca Albanese + Nadia Abu El-Haj

Israel's Settler Colonialism: Law, Humanity, Empire
What have we learned from Edward Said on the Question of Palestine?

Francesca Albanese will deliver the lecture alongside respondent Nadia Abu El-Haj.

3 October 2023
The Mosaic Rooms | London

On the twentieth anniversary of his passing, Francesca Albanese explores Said’s profound legacy by delving into Israel’s settler colonial rule in the occupied Palestinian territory. Through a rigorous examination of international law within the context of global empire, Albanese confronts Israel’s colonial injustice and charts a course of action for legal and humanist resistance. Embracing Said’s work within the legal discipline entails upholding the principles of human rights and dignity, challenging oppressive systems and advocating for justice.

Francesca Albanese is an Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, and a Senior Advisor on Migration and Forced Displacement for the think tank Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD), where she co-founded the Global Network on the Question of Palestine (GNQP), a coalition of renowned professional and scholars engaged in/on Israel/Palestine. She has published widely on the legal situation in Israel/Palestine; her latest book, Palestinian Refugees in International Law (Oxford University Press, 2020), offers a comprehensive legal analysis of the situation of Palestinian refugees from its origins to modern-day reality. She regularly teaches and lectures on International Law and Forced Displacement in European and Arab universities, and speaks frequently at conferences and public events on the legal situation of Palestine. She worked for a decade as a human rights expert for the United Nations, including the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees. In these capacities, she advised the UN, governments, and civil society across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Asia Pacific, on the enforcement of human rights norms, especially for vulnerable groups including refugees and migrants. She holds a Law Degree (with honors) from the University of Pisa and an LLM in Human Rights from the University of London, SOAS. She is currently completing her PhD in International Refugee Law at Amsterdam University Law Faculty.

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia. Among other publications, she is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2001), which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002; The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (University of Chicago Press, 2012); and, most recently, Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America (Verso, 2022).

The annual Edward W. Said London Lecture series is supported by The Mosaic Rooms/A. M. Qattan Foundation and London Review of Books. Find out more about the series and previous speakers here.

ATTEND | Q&A w/ Shatha Hanaysha on 9/27/23 at 6PM

Hana Elias, MS '19, will be moderating a Q&A with Shatha Hanaysha, a Palestinian journalist from Jenin in the occupied West Bank. She has worked as a field journalist and reporter for several news websites and TV stations, including Middle East Eye. She has covered the region since 2015, often reporting on raids by Israeli occupation forces into Jenin and elsewhere in the West Bank. In May 2022, while reporting in Jenin as a correspondent for Ultra Palestine, she survived the shooting that killed Al Jazeera Correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh. She earned her bachelor’s in Palestine and is now pursuing a Master’s in Media Studies at the American University of Beirut. This event is co-sponsored by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, the Li Center on Global Journalism, and CJS_AMEJA.

Registration is required for this Columbia Journalism School event.  

  • Registration closes at 3 p.m. on the day of the event. 

  • Please note that no one who has not registered in advance to attend will be admitted. 

    • No substitutions are allowed. 

    • Please bring iD.

ATTEND | Bisan Lecture Series w/ Timothy Brennan on 9/27/23

Criticism and Corporate Myth: Edward Said and the Media
Online | 12pm ET

Said’s maneuvering within the media was the most skillful and least recognized of his accomplishments. There his literary training came most to the fore and the methods of the humanities showed their unique political powers. He took very seriously studies of corporate mind-management, media indoctrination, and the information industries, often citing the work of Herbert Schiller (“mind managers”), the Austrian economist Fritz Machlup (“information society”), Regis Debray (“mediocracy”) and the propaganda model put forth by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman. If Covering Islam is usually considered his only sustained critique of the media, in fact he focused on digital fabulation throughout his career in essays, for example, on Walter Lippman, George Orwell, C. Wright Mills and Sean McBride, whose UNESCO report on the “new world information order” was particularly influential. His unifying idea was that U.S. intellectuals no longer commanded the public erudition, metaphysical authority, or aesthetic arbitration they enjoyed everywhere else in the world. By contrast, they had assumed the guise of anonymous technicians in the sciences or of soft news entertainers (Jon Stewart and Laura Ingram rather than Jurgen Habermas or Martha Nussbaum). He was not only a media theorist, of course, but a media celebrity; and he achieved this by creating a persona – that of the unaffiliated conscience, the defiant generalist who spoke not from faction or material interests but in pursuit of “the case.” Knowing a great deal about many unrelated things allowed him to make connections others missed, and the prejudice that the humanities, although high-minded, have no teeth played into his hands. He fashioned a new kind of authority by obliterating the credibility of “specialists.”

Timothy Brennan’s essays on literature, cultural politics, intellectuals, and imperial culture have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Times Literary Supplement, New Left Review, Critical Inquiry, and the London Review of Books. He teaches humanities at the University of Minnesota, and is the author most recently of Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021) and Borrowed Light, Vol I: Vico, Hegel and the Colonies (Stanford, 2014). He is currently at work on the second volume of Borrowed Light: Imperial Form.

This event is a part of the Bisan Lecture Series and is organized by Scientists for Palestine and the Bisan Center for Research and Development.

ATTEND | Palestine for Hawai‘i Online Event on 9/9/23

Palestine for Hawai‘i - Teach-In and Fundraiser to Support Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) Communities Rebuild


Saturday September 9th, 2023
10-11 AM Hawaii / 1-2 PM PST/ 4-5 PM EST
Online, hosted by Jadaliyya (live-streamed and recorded)

Zoom Link: 
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89743029276
Meeting ID: 897 4302 9276 

Join Palestinian, Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian), and allied scholars and movement workers for a teach-in and fundraiser to support Indigenous rebuilding efforts in Maui. 

The recent wildfires in Maui have left historic Hawaiian communities devastated, with 99 confirmed dead, one thousand missing people and thousands more displaced from their homes and lands. As Kanaka Maoli have taught us, these wildfires are not “natural,” but are settler colonial disasters with roots in the expropriation of Native lands, waters, and other natural resources – in the service of the tourist industry and backed by the U.S. military-industrial complex.

This teach-in centers the histories and experiences of Kanaka Maoli communities with U.S. settler colonialism in Hawai’i, continued organizing for Hawaiian sovereignty, and practices of solidarity between Hawai’i and Palestine. It is grounded in the recognition as Palestinians that Native Hawaiian’s ongoing struggles for freedom from U.S. military occupation and settler colonialism are interconnected with our own continued struggle for liberation from Israeli colonial violence.

In the immediate wake of city, county and state government abandonment, and with private realtors now preying on those who have lost their homes, we call on Palestinians across the diaspora (and our allies) to support Native Hawaiians’ local efforts to rebuild their communities and livelihoods as an act of radical love and reciprocal solidarity. 

We encourage community donations directly to Mauna Medic Healers Hui and Pacific Birth Collective. 

Speakers
Cynthia Franklin is Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i. She coedits the journal Biography. She is the author of Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea (2023), Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University Today (2009) and Writing Women’s Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Multi-Genre Anthologies (1994). Coedited special journal issues include, for Biography, “Life in Occupied Palestine” (2014).  She has served for 10 years on the Organizing Collective of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), and cofounded Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UH (SFJP@UH) and Jewish Voice for Peace-Hawai'i.  

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui is Professor of American Studies and affiliate faculty in Anthropology at Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses related to critical Indigenous studies, critical race studies, settler colonial studies and anarchist studies. She is the author of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Duke University Press 2008); Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism (Duke University Press 2018); and Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders (University of Minnesota Press 2018). She serves on the advisory board for the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

Māhealani Ahia (she/her/'o ia) is a Los-Angeles born Kanaka Maoli scholar, activist, songcatcher, and storykeeper with lineal ties to Lāhainā, Maui. Māhea is a PhD candidate in English (Hawaiian Literature) and in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her dissertation entitled, “Shapeshifting Hawaiian Biography: the Life and Afterlives of Kihawahine,” theorizes feminist power and leadership within the moʻo (reptilian water deity) clan connected to Lāhainā. Māhea is an organizer for Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UH and co-organizer of the Mauna Kea Syllabus Project.

Kahala Johnson (he/they/ʻo ia) is an Indigenous politics, futures, and gender and sexuality studies scholar at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Their research focuses on genderqueer and poly decolonial love, and their dissertation, “A Night Slippery with Echoes,” examines decolonized futures of the Hawaiian Kingdom. They are co-founder of the Hale Māhū (LGBTQ space) at Puʻuhuluhulu University at Mauna Kea, where they welcomed Palestinian allies. Born and raised in Nā Wai ʻEhā, Maui, Kahala has been working with family to reoccupy ancestral lands, and has helped build multiple puʻuhonua (refuge) across Maui.

Nour Joudah is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA and a former President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at UC-Berkeley (2022-23). Dr. Joudah completed her PhD in Geography at UCLA (2022), and wrote her dissertation Mapping Decolonized Futures: Indigenous Visions for Hawaii and Palestine on the efforts by Palestinian and native Hawaiian communities to imagine and work toward liberated futures while centering indigenous duration as a non-linear temporality. Her work examines mapping practices and indigenous survival and futures in settler states, highlighting how indigenous countermapping is a both cartographic and decolonial praxis. She also has an MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and wrote her MA thesis on the role and perception of exile politics within the Palestinian liberation struggle, in particular among politically active Palestinian youth living in the United States and occupied Palestine.

Rana Barakat is Asociate Professor of history and Director of the Museum at Birzeit University in Palestine. Her research interests include the history and historiography of colonialism, nationalism, and cultures of resistance. She has published in several venues including the Journal of Palestine Studies, Jerusalem Quarterly, Settler Colonial Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. She has a book forthcoming with UNC Press titled Lifta and Resisting the Museumification of Palestine: Indigenous History of the Nakba, which advances an Indigenous understanding of time, space, and memory in Palestine by focusing on the details of the people and place of Lifta village over time. And her second book is in progress, The Buraq Revolt: Constructing a History of Resistance in Palestine, argues that this 1929 revolt was the first sign in the mandate period of sustained mass resistance to the settler-colonial project, including direct and rhetorical actions against both political Zionism and British imperialism, planting seeds of a century of mass political mobilization.  

To visit the event page on Jadaliyya, click here. 

ATTEND | Music Against Empire on 9/8/23

Music Against Empire: Contemporary and Historical Excavations of Trauma and Resistance

Convenors: Ege Yumusak (Philosophy/SOF) and Knar Abrahamyan (Music)

Sound continues to act as a form of resistance to systemic oppression in contemporary classical, improvised and even popular music. While recording technology and conditions of war have posed great limitations, we also have access to music made by historical victims—such as victims of war. Join us for a performance and conversation about music against empire. Led by Knar Abrahamyan, our panelists will engage with historical and contemporary musical sources that foreground resistance to erasure, oppression, and cultural assimilation. How can sonic practices effectuate the emergence of collective memory in the face of trauma? In what ways have song and poetry manifested notions of belonging? How can listening as a form of solidarity factor into forging resilience?

Knar Abrahamyan (Music) will lead a discussion with Jill Jarvis (Yale) and Hiba Abid (NYPL), following a musical presentation by Layale Chaker’s Sarafand Ensemble.

This event is organized by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities and cosponsored by Columbia Maison Français and the Department of Music. For more info, click here.