2017 Workshop

Abdel Takriti

Associate Professor in Modern Arab History, University of Houston
Chair of Arab-American Educational Foundation

Digital Histories of the Underground: Teaching the Palestinian Revolution

This presentation will examine the histories of transnational revolutionaries from a pedagogical angle, focusing on the experience of building the Palestinian Revolution website hosted by the University of Oxford, a collaborative effort engaging with the largest and most persistent Arab revolutionary experience in modern history. Such major projects give rise to pedagogical problems that are not only specific to Palestine, but that are also shared by other anti-colonial struggles. Educators are confronted by the dispersal of documentary written sources; the dearth of accessible oral sources; and the lack of a special curriculum for teaching these sources. A fourth dilemma is that this kind of history is mostly ‘hidden’, created by movements, parties, and individuals that were operating within clandestine underground networks, carefully concealing their work and ensuring that no traces of their actions were left behind. In addition to examining these dilemmas through detailed interaction with the website, this presentation will consider their implications for modern Palestinian revolutionary historiography as well as broader approaches to the study of anti-colonial revolutions.

----------------