23 January
2025
Type of event: 
Mediating Palestine: Representation, Mobilization, and Experimentation
Organizing office: 
IPS Washington
Date: 
Thursday, January 23, 2025 - 18:00 - 19:30
Eastern Date:: 
Thursday, January 23, 2025 - 11:00 - 12:30
Language: 
English
Location: 
Online
Venue: 
Zoom
About the event: 

*JOIN US ON ZOOM ON THURSDAY JANUARY 23 AT 11AM ET / 6PM PALESTINE*

Palestinians practice media—through documentary production, photography, art, animation, social media, and journalism—to defy the media stereotypes that seek to reduce them to perpetrators or victims, and to mobilize imagination for liberation.

Join us for a discussion with co-editors and contributors of the latest issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies. This special issue seeks to amplify and contextualize Palestinian media work as Palestinians strive to survive and flourish in the midst of ongoing Nakba.

Photo by Monther Rasheed via Alamy.
About the speakers: 

Sherene Seikaly is a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2024-25) and Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her book Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores economy, territory, the home, and the body. Her forthcoming book, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine tells a global history of capital, slavery, and dispossession. She is the Editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UCSB, co-editor of the Stanford Studies Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures Series, and co-editor of Jadaliyya

Diana Allan is an associate professor of anthropology at McGill University. She is a filmmaker, co-director of the Critical Media Lab, and co-founder of the Nakba Archive, which has documented histories of the 1948 expulsion with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Allan holds a Canada Research Chair in the anthropology of living archives and is currently a member of the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton

Amahl Bishara is a professor of anthropology at Tufts University. She is the author of Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022) and Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

Lina Abu Akleh is a Palestinian journalist, and the niece of the late Shireen Abu Akleh, the renowned Al Jazeera journalist killed by an Israeli soldier in 2022. Lina has become a powerful voice for accountability and the pursuit of truth, relentlessly pushing for justice in her aunt’s case and for the global fight for press freedom and the protection of journalists. Her advocacy has earned her recognition on several prestigious platforms: she was named one of Time’s Next 100 Emerging Leaders in 2022 for her tireless work in seeking accountability for Shireen’s killing, and she was also included in BBC’s 100 Women list for the same year, highlighting her influence as a change-maker. Lina holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Studies from the American University of Beirut and a Master’s in International Studies from the University of San Francisco. She currently works as a News Producer for Al Jazeera English and serves as the Vice President of the Shireen Abu Akleh Foundation.  

Sarah Ema Friedland is a documentary filmmaker and media artist based in New York. Friedland’s works have screened widely in the US and abroad and have been broadcast nationally on PBS. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Paul Newman Foundation, the Ford Foundation, NYSCA, the LABA House of Study, The Palestinian American Research Center, and MacDowell. She is a recipient of the 2014 Paul Robeson Award from the Newark Museum and was nominated for a New York Emmy. Friedland was the inaugural Director of the MDOCS Storyteller’s Institute at Skidmore College. She is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor at NYU in the Liberal Studies program and the Director of the Liberal Studies Global Media Lab. She is an active member of the Meerkat Media Collective.

Ghousoon Bisharat is editor-in-chief of +972 Magazine, as well as a strategic communications and international cooperation expert. She has more than twenty years of experience working with leading international broadcast news outlets and the European Union.

Anna Shah Hoque is an independent curator and doctoral candidate at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa. She is currently teaching at Mount Allison University. Her work examines the relationship between contemporary visual arts and archival praxis among South Asian and Indigenous artists and curators in settler Canada.

Sherena Razek is a diasporic Palestinian feminist educator, scholar, activist, and labor organizer. At Brown, she is the co-founder of the Palestine Solidarity Caucus of the Graduate Labor Organization and a PhD candidate in the Department of Modern Culture and Media. Her dissertation project “Nakba Ecologies: On Elemental Intifada in Colonized Palestine” offers a grounded intervention in the emergent field of elemental media studies by tethering the classical elements of water, fire, earth, and air to their specific valences in Palestinian film, photography, performance, poetics, and counter archives. Her curatorial work has addressed the politics and aesthetics of surveillance, oceanic degradation, and the militarization and materialization of nation-state borders between the Global North and the Global South. This fall she will begin in her new role as Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UMass Boston.

Sulafa Zidani is an assistant professor of communication studies at Northwestern University. Her work on internet cultures in the Global South has appeared in journals such as Information, Communication, and Society, the International Journal of Communication, and Media, Culture, and Society.

yasmine eid-sabbagh explores potentials of human agency by engaging in experimental, collective work processes in her practice. Photography often acts as a medium for her to communally investigate notions of collectivity, power, and endurance, including through her engagement as a member of the Arab Image Foundation, a practitioner-led archival institution, and as a focus in her PhD in art theory and cultural studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2018).

Related Journal Issue
Journal of Palestine Studies
Vol. 53 No. 3, 2024

Read more