Friday, March 4 –
Saturday, March 5, 2016
McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street Providence, RI United States
Closed Workshop
This closed workshop will be the third annual meeting of New Directions in Palestinian Studies(NDPS), initiated in 2013 by the Middle East Studies Program at Brown University in consultation and cooperation with colleagues at the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS, the European Centre for Palestine Studies at Exeter; as well as in other universities and institutes such as NYU, Birzeit, Institute for Palestine Studies, and MADA. NDPS seeks to provide a platform for rigorous intellectual exchange on new research trends and the forms of political mobilization they open and foreclose. An important goal is to expand the academic and political space for emerging scholars.
The topic of this year’s closed workshop will discuss “Approaches to Research on Palestine and the Palestinians.”
Academic knowledge production on Palestine and the Palestinians has long been shaped by an ongoing and deeply internationalized colonial encounter, by the symbolically and religiously saturated place of the “Holy Land” in the global imaginary, and by the persistent struggle for freedom and self-determination by Palestinians despite the massive ruptures they have experienced since the late nineteenth century. For a variety of reasons, the field of Palestine and Palestinian studies has undergone a transformation over the past two decades. It has rapidly grown quantitatively and qualitatively, with new lines of inquiry pushing in several new directions simultaneously.
Background
The first two symposiums — “Political Economy and the Economy of Politics,” (March 2014) and “Political Culture and the Culture of Politics,” (March 2015)— generated a great deal of discussion and led to numerous collaborations. For more information see http://palestinianstudies.org/about/.
Since then, funds were raised to endow the continuation of NDPS meetings and the creation of a post-doctoral position in Palestinian Studies. 2016-17 candidate is Areej Sabbagh-Khoury.
This is an opportune moment, therefore, to step back and re-evaluate NDPS in order to think about the best ways to move forward over the next three to five years.