2015 Workshop

Palestine: Political Cultures and the Cultures of Politics

New Directions in Palestinian Studies aims to shape scholarly works in this field through annual workshops, an endowed post-doctoral fellowship, and a book series with the University of California Press. The thematically organized workshops bring together emerging and established scholars to take stock of research trends, identify promising new questions and sources, and encourage networking across academic and research institutions.

The 2015 symposium seeks to push the “political” beyond its conventional boundaries through both materialist and discursive analyses of political culture and the culture of politics. The process of identifying potential participants for this symposium has revealed an incredible richness of politically informed forms of cultural production, on the one hand; but huge gaps in understanding the political experiences of ordinary Palestinians and how they are mediated, reproduced, and transformed by cultural practices, on the other. The 2015 symposium is our attempt to fill those gaps and to critically explore and crystallize emerging new lines of inquiry and the political spaces they open and foreclose.

The 2015 symposium seeks to push the “political” beyond its conventional boundaries through both materialist and discursive analyses of political culture and the culture of politics. The process of identifying potential participants for this symposium has revealed an incredible richness of politically informed forms of cultural production, on the one hand; but huge gaps in understanding the political experiences of ordinary Palestinians and how they are mediated, reproduced, and transformed by cultural practices, on the other. The 2015 symposium is our attempt to fill those gaps and to critically explore and crystallize emerging new lines of inquiry and the political spaces they open and foreclose.