ATTEND | “The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh” Screening & Discussion

Monday, May 1, 2023 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
The World Room, Pulitzer Hall
2950 Broadway, New York, NY 10027

On May 11, 2022, Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was reporting from the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank when she was shot and killed. Abu Akleh was an American citizen, and her killing has brought into sharp focus the United States's handling of her case. 

The Fault Lines film “The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh” investigates her death, speaking to witnesses on the ground and taking questions to the White House and State Department about whether the U.S. will investigate her shooting.

Ahead of World Press Freedom Day, join executive producer Laila Al-Arian J'06, correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous, and senior producer Kavitha Chekuru for a screening and conversation about their film “The Killing of Shireen Abu Akleh” at Columbia Journalism School.

Non-Columbia attendees must RSVP here.

Complete Event info can be found here.

Sponsored by the Li Center for Global Journalism and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.

Questions? Contact Mindy Myers mem2293@columbia.edu.

ATTEND | Gil Hochberg and Yali Hashash in conversation with Tali Keren

"Un-Charting" Settler colonial imagination between Zionism and American exceptionalism

Wed, Apr 26, 2023
06:30 PM – 08:00 PM

The James Gallery
CUNY Graduate Center

Join scholars Gil Hochberg, Yali Hashash, and artist Tali Keren for a screening of Keren’s film, Un-Charting, followed by a conversation on the themes of the film, which critically investigates the shared settler colonial imagination between Zionism and American exceptionalism.

Hochberg will discuss her research, which challenges the Judeo-Christian tradition and writing of world history. She argues that Judeo-Christianity is a fabricated myth that has not only harmed and shaped Jewish-Muslim relations but has also engineered broader histories of modernity which include violent partitions, fragmentations, and colonization.

Hashash offers Mizrahi feminist critical theory as a method for generating alternatives and resistance to the conservative Evangelical intervention in Israeli politics and explores what that means for Jewish life in and outside of Israel. Through an intersectional framework, she will share her assessment about Israel’s role in global, fundamentalist far-right evangelicalism. By looking at the legacies and contemporary impact of Judeo-Christian world-making–its realities generated from myth-making and history writing–the discussion will trace how this tradition has stoked Islamophobia and pitted Jews and Muslims against one another as well as contributed to the erasure of both Palestinian and Mizrahi identity and culture.

The conversation with speakers and the audience aims to open a space for solidarity and unlearning while foregrounding alternative liberatory possibilities.

For more info, including speaker bios, click here.

CONGRATS | Lila Abu-Lughod elected as a 2023 member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

CPS is thrilled to share that our Core Faculty member, Lila Abu-Lughod, was elected as a 2023 member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

In 1780, the Academy’s founders – including John Adams and John Hancock – envisioned an organization that would recognize accomplished individuals and engage them in addressing the greatest challenges facing the young nation. The first members elected to the Academy in 1781 included Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. The nearly 270 members elected in 2023 are drawn from academia, the arts, industry, policy, research, and science, and include more than 40 International Honorary Members (IHM) from 23 countries.

For more information about the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and to learn more about Professor Abu-Lughod and the other members of the 2023 cohort, visit: New Members Elected in 2023: American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

ATTEND | The Fredrik Barth Lecture w/ Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod at Boston University

Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod will deliver the inaugural Fredrik Barth Lecture at Boston University on “Museum Politics & the Problem of Voice,” on Wednesday, April 19th 2023, at 4pm, with a reception to follow.

Abstract: Although politically and ethically crucial, the recent ferment around decolonizing museums and anthropology--including debates about colonial violence, repatriation, restitution, philanthrocapitalism, and reform through inclusion of community “voices”---risks erasing differences among types and missions of museums, ignoring limits of reform in institutions of public education, and downplaying emotional and intellectual attachments of visitors to museums. Reflecting on my own engagements with museums as I was growing up; my resistance to broadsides about metropolitan museums misapplied to the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit (about which I know something of the dynamics and history); and the challenges of participating in the conceptual development of a major exhibit in 2022 on nomadic pastoralism at the National Museum of Qatar—I suggest that we might make room for cautious ambivalence in these debates.

Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor at Columbia University, teaching in the Department of Anthropology and at the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. She is the author, editor or co-editor of numerous books and articles including Veiled Sentiments; Writing Women's Worlds; Dramas of Nationhood; Do Muslim Women Need Saving? and most recently The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism (Duke University Press, 2023), co-edited with Rema Hammami and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and based on a collaborative project through the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia. Alongside work based on long term ethnography in Egypt and engagement with feminist issues within and beyond anthropology, she has explored issues of memory and violence in Palestine (Nakba) and museum politics in settler colonial states. Participation in the development of a major exhibit in 2022 at the National Museum of Qatar on nomadic pastoralists is leading her to reflect on debates about the ethics, politics, and limits of the museum as a forum for public education.

The Fredrik Barth Lecture series is intended to foster discussion and debate on the relationship between individual knowledge and action in the world in the context of contemporary complex societies.

Our colleague Fredrik Barth reminded us that social life is an action-based exercise in problem solving and life-course making. Barth saw the processes of social life as grounded in the efforts of ordinary actors to create a way of life and a sense of themselves in the mobile, pluralized, and participatory circumstances of the modern world. It is this unassuming but foundational reality that made Barth's presence in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University so consequential: he taught us to recognize the play of forces and structures at work in human societies, while reminding us never to lose sight of the equally vital reality of human deliberation and freedom.

WATCH | An Evening with Jumana Manna Event Recording

On 9 December 2023 CPS hosted Jumana Manna for a screening of her film FORAGERS (2022) and an artist talk. The event was co-presented by the Graduate School Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

FORAGERS (2022) depicts the dramas around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with wry humor and a meditative pace. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Jerusalem, it employs fiction, documentary and archival footage to portray the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on these customs. The restrictions prohibit the collection of the artichoke-like ’akkoub and za’atar (thyme), and have resulted in fines and trials for hundreds caught collecting these native plants. For Palestinians, these laws constitute an ecological veil for legislation that further alienates them from their land while Israeli state representatives insist on their scientific expertise and duty to protect. Following the plants from the wild to the kitchen, from the chases between the foragers and the nature patrol, to courtroom defenses, Foragers captures the joy and knowledge embodied in these traditions alongside their resilience to the prohibitive law. By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on.

Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of archaeology, agriculture and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruly potential of ruination as an integral part of life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.

View original event page.

ATTEND | Refugee Cities: Symposium on the Urban Dimensions of Forced Displacement

The Refugee Cities Working Group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University, presents an interdisciplinary public symposium, “Refugee Cities: Urban Dimensions of Forced Displacement.”

The Refugee Cities Working Group’s concerns lie at the intersection of urban studies on the one hand and, on the other, the humanistic and social justice-oriented study of the mass movement of people fleeing violence, war, and forced removal. This symposium will focus on the impact of refugees on cities and urban processes, both in the present moment and as a historical phenomenon.

A keynote lecture will take place on the evening of Thursday, April 27, with all other presentations to be scheduled throughout the day on Friday, April 28. All events will take place in person at the Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia University, New York.

For complete info about the symposium, click here.
For questions, contact: refugeecitiesCSSD@gmail.com 

ATTEND | "11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile" with Nadia Fahd, Perla Issa, Muhammad Ali Khalidi, and Diane Riskedahl

Join Hearing Palestine and the Institute for Palestine Studies for the launch of 11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exile in an online event, featuring Nadia Fahd, Perla Issa, Muhammad Ali Khalidi, and Diane Riskedahl, on March 30th at 12pm. 11 Lives is co-published with the Institute for Palestine Studies and OR Books. 

 "The 11 lives given voice here are unique, each an expression of the myriad displacements that war and occupation have forced upon Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948. At the same time, they form a collective testament of a people driven from their homes and land by colonial occupation. Each story is singular; and each tells the story of all Palestinians.    

As Edward Said argued in 1984, the object of Israel’s colonial warfare is not only material—seeking to minimise Palestinian existence as such—but is also a narrative project that aims to obliterate Palestinian history “as possessed of a coherent narrative direction pointed towards self-determination.”

In these pages, Palestinian refugees narrate their own histories. The product of a creative-writing workshop organized by the Institute for Palestine Studies in Lebanon, 11 Lives tells of children’s adventures in the alleyways of refugee camps, of teenage martyrs and ghosts next-door, of an UNRWA teacher’s dismay at the shallowness of her colleagues, and of the love, labour, and land that form the threads of a red keffiyeh.

What unites these 11 stories is “the inadmissible existence of the Palestinian people” highlighted by Said. Their words persist, as one contributor writes, “between the Nakba and the Naksa, throughout defeats and massacres, love affairs and revolutions.” The stories of Palestinians in exile are also open-ended, and will continue to reverberate across borders until Palestine is free."

ATTEND | FARHA Screening + Convo w/ filmmaker Darin Sallam

Join the Middle East Institute for a screening of FARHA, followed by a conversation with filmmaker Darin Sallam. The conversation will be moderated by Gil Hochberg (MESASS) and Alessandra Amin (Center for Palestine Studies).

DATE
Saturday, April 1, 2023
2:30 PM 5:30 PM

LOCATION
Northwest Corner Building
550 W 120th
New York, NY, 10027

About FARHA
Inspired by true events, FARHA tells the story of a young Palestinian girl whose dream changes from seeking an education in the city to surviving Al-Nakba in Palestine 1948.

DARIN SALLAM holds an MFA from the Red Sea Institute for Cinematic Arts (RSICA), affiliated with the University of Southern California. To her credit are 5 award-winning shorts, including THE DARK OUTSIDE (2012) and THE PARROT (2016). A Berlinale Talent 2021, a Robert Bosch 2015 Film Prize recipient and recently inducted into the prestigious Asia Pacific Screen Academy, Sallam was selected to the 2017 La Cité Internationale des Arts residency in Paris and to the 2018 Global Media Makers fellowship by Film Independent in Los Angeles. She was a jury member at international film festivals and is co-founder & managing partner at the Amman-based production company TaleBox.

Her critically acclaimed debut feature film FARHA (2021) had its world premiere at the 46th Toronto International Film Festival, won 12 awards to date from international film festivals including best film, best director, the jury award, the audience award and the grand prize and started streaming in December 2022 on Netflix worldwide. FARHA was also selected as Jordan’s entry in the International Feature Film category at the 95th Academy Awards (Oscars) in 2023 and achieved a historic first win for Jordan by receiving the Best Youth Film award at the 15th Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA), known as “the Asian Oscars”, making Sallam the first Jordanian director ever to be awarded an APSA.

Questions?
Email mei@columbia.edu