ATTEND | (Anti-) Colonialism and its Afterlives Conference on 4/27-28/24

The Critical Perspectives program at the New School for Social Research, New York, invites you to a two-day conference, (Anti-)Colonialism and its Afterlives. 

The event features leading scholars from around the world and aims to broaden the intellectual and political criticism of colonial modernity by exploring themes ranging from: Popular Politics, Marxism, Palestine/Israel, Abolitionism, Migration, and Ecology. The plenary keynote session, on April 28, is a roundtable discussion with speakers who have made significant contributions to the traditions of anti-colonial thought broadly understood.The keynote will be followed by an open reception. 

For more information and to register for the conference, click here. The conference will take place on April 27-28 at 6 E. 16th Street, Wolff Conference Room (D1103), and is co-sponsored by The Zolberg Institute, the University Student Senate, the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung NYC, the Janey Program, and the departments of Politics and Sociology at NSSR.

CONGRATS | Gil Hochberg Receives 2024 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award

CPS congratulates faculty member Gil Hochberg for receiving a 2024 Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award.

She was chosen for her René Wellek Prize-winning monograph, Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future, and her leadership in fostering constructive student and faculty conversations on Israel and Gaza as chair of the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies.

Gil Hochberg is the Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies - Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and a member of the Center for Palestine Studies Faculty Collective.

For more info, click here.

ATTEND | Virtual Gaza: Notes on Martial Design on 03/14/24

Middle Eastern Studies Program, Center for Human Rights and the Arts, and Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard College Present

Virtual Gaza: Notes on Martial Design
Thursday, March 14, 2024

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
Bard College
5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Ali Musleh, Columbia University Center for Palestine Studies

Siege warfare and occupation as conducted by the Israeli state are in permanent beta phase. AI-powered systems of targeting, remote and robotic weaponry, terraforming munitions, algorithmic governance, mass shock-and-awe assaults—these, among other forms of violence, are all treated as tests in an endless iterative loop. With each incursion into Palestinian lifeworlds, new terrains of intervention are opened up to the power and forces of design, from the nervous system of the occupied to the subterranean spaces of armed insurgency. With a focus on Gaza since the turn of the 21st Century, this talk explores design as a spirit of approach to settler-colonial warfare. It shows how conceptualizing design as war can offer new insights into settler colonialism’s virtual potential to generate new and emergent forms of horror. Imprisoned within Israel’s iterative design abyss, a virtual Gaza is formed and reformed without telos or end, one where the designers of armed violence give themselves up to an open-ended process of becoming with weapons that implicates the entirety of settler society.

Ali H. Musleh is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at the Columbia University Center for Palestine Studies. He is also associate researcher at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (UH-M) Hawaiʻi Research Center for Futures Studies. In 2022, he received his PhD from the Department of Political Science at UHM, where he taught global politics and political design and futuristics.

For more info, click here.