2025 Workshop
(Re)Building Lives, Forging Futures
The tenth annual workshop of New Directions in Palestinian Studies (NDPS) is to be held at Brown University on April 4–5, 2025, on the theme, "(Re)Building Lives, Forging Futures."
We are pleased to share this public call for papers for the tenth annual New Directions in Palestinian Studies (NDPS) workshop. The theme, “(Re)Building Lives, Forging Futures,” focuses on how Palestinians’ (re)assemble their families, communities, and body politic during and after catastrophe, including amidst this current genocide.
To present an original unpublished paper, please submit a proposal of approximately 500 words along with a brief CV via email by January 13, 2025. Selected participants will be notified in late January and asked to submit a draft of 3,000–7,000 words by March 21, 2025. All paper presenters are expected to give NDPS first right to publication.
As with all NDPS workshops, we encourage proposals that put Palestinians at the center of the analysis. We seek explorations of Palestinian experiences in different historical periods and locations—past and present, urban and rural, throughout Palestine and outside it—from various disciplinary perspectives, as well as from practitioners in fields such as law, architecture, public health, literature, movement organizing, and the arts.
By invitation
LETTER OF INVITATION
Reclamation, reconstitution, revitalization, regeneration, and resistance in the face of erasure are inherent to the modern Palestinian condition. In addition to relentless everyday structural violence, Palestinians have experienced generational catastrophes (World War I, 1948, 1967, 1982, 2023–present) characterized by large scale killing, destruction of built environments, forced displacement, and ghettoization. Yet here they remain, more tenacious than ever, after every political and military defeat.
In the context of ongoing genocide, it is more critical than ever to understand practices and adaptations on the micro level that lay the foundations for collective social, cultural, and political movements. Such practices often lie below the radar of the de jure political field and remain hidden in the shadows of events of blinding historic scale such the 1948 nakba. The 2025 NDPS workshop is open to proposals from any discipline or perspective that consider how Palestinians adapt, survive, and reconstitute themselves. Topics include but are not limited to: Family and kinship, gender and childhood, labor and educational networks, literary and cultural currents, political mobilization and global solidarity, and institution building and philanthropy.
Format and Logistics
The workshop format facilitates intellectual exchange via pre-circulated papers, brief presentations, and extended discussions in five panels over a two-day period. Usually, invited senior and mid-career scholars chair panels and/or participate in discussions, while most presentation slots are reserved for younger scholars. For this workshop, the mix of presenters will be evenly distributed.
Middle East Studies at Brown will reimburse reasonable travel expenses and two nights lodging (three nights for those coming from overseas) for panel members (authors of think pieces and discussants). In keeping with our tradition at NDPS, senior scholars with research funds are encouraged to pay their own expenses in order to make possible full funding for emerging scholars. For those traveling from abroad, please keep in mind that reimbursement is possible only for those entering the United States on a Visa Waiver Business (VWB) or B-1 visa. Please direct any questions to palestinianstudiesconference@brown.edu.
About NDPS
Over the past generation, the field of Palestine and Palestinian studies has grown rapidly, attracting some of the best and brightest scholars. NDPS provides a platform for new lines of inquiry that seek to decolonize, globalize, and de-exceptionalize knowledge production about the Palestinians. Launched in 2012 as a research initiative of Brown University’s Middle East Studies program, NDPS is dedicated to supporting the work and careers of emerging scholars through annual workshops, an endowed post-doctoral fellowship, and a book series.
NDPS workshops have earned a reputation for frank and rigorous discussions that consider the intellectual, ethical, and moral stakes of new research agendas in Palestinian Studies and the political spaces they open and foreclose. Select NDPS papers and think pieces have been published as double-blind refereed articles in special issues of the Jerusalem Quarterly, the Journal of Palestine Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and other journals.