Call for Proposals: Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) at the American University of Beirut (15 December 2018)

Call for Proposals: Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) at the American University of Beirut (15 December 2018)

Call for Proposals: Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) at the American University of Beirut (15 December 2018)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The POHA project is soliciting proposals for the Archive’s launch conference on June 3 – 4, 2019. Applicants must submit an abstract of 500 words in addition to a CV by 15 December 2018. Applications should be sent to: ifi.comms@aub.edu.lb with the subject line: POHA Conference. The Palestinian Oral History Archive is an archival collection that contains more than 1,000 hours of testimonies with first generation Palestinians and other Palestinian communities in Lebanon The project’s aim is to digitize, index, catalog, preserve, and provide access to the material through the creation of a state-of-the-art digital platform. It aims to expand and include additional oral history collections documenting varied aspects of the Palestinian experience in Lebanon and the region. The project is being completed in partnership with the AUB Libraries, the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs, the Nakba Archive and the Arab Resource Center for Popular Arts (AL-JANA), and is currently funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant (2016-19). POHA is co-housed by IFI and AUB Libraries The conference will be held at the American University of Beirut in June 2019, and will mark the launch of the Palestinian Oral History Archive. Papers are solicited under the conference’s four themes, as they relate to oral histories in, from and about the region: I-

  1. Women Histories: Oral histories: a synergy?

    A preference will be given to papers which address inter-generational, and inter-regional aspects. A great number of the interviewees in the POHA collection are women: the archive thus offers rich material for the exploration of women’s lives in pre-1948 Palestine, their experience of refuge in the events of 1948, and their experience in the early days of refuge in Lebanon. Proposals under this theme are encouraged to tap into the archive’s rich potential of inscribing the voice of subaltern women into the historical record, producing research on any facet of women’s history made possible by the testimonies housed in the archive. 

  2. Use of Digital Mapping Tools: How can digital tools help bring out the potential of oral history projects? 

    A preference will be given to papers which explore the potential of digital humanities for oral history projects from and about the region. Layers of geographic data available in the interviews, as well as the fine-tuned indexing of geographic markers and local landmarks, render the archive a rich source for complementing and enriching the cartographic and human-geographic repository available thus far. Proposals under this theme are encouraged to employ the Archive’s geographic data using digital tools for mapping, visualization, and spatial-temporal storytelling. 

  3. Oral History as Ethnography: How can an ethnographic stance for oral histories advance new histories in, from and about the region?

    A preference will be given to papers that combine a general theoretical stance with an applied methodological take on oral history in and about the region. In avoiding transcription of interviews, and the flattening of a sonic and visual experience into text, POHA strove to maintain the power of oral history in allowing for a dialogical-ethnographic stance for the researcher. Proposals under this theme are encouraged to reflect on the researcher’s ethnographic positioning while exploring oral history interviews, and the methodological implications such a stance allows. 

  4. Theories and Methods of Oral History Archiving: How can oral history fill in the silences, gaps and omissions in the Archive?

    How best to archive oral histories? What kind of ethical questions does archiving oral histories from and about refugees in particular, and other groups in the region in general, raise? A key concern of the project has been devising a methodology for archiving oral history that remains faithful to the narrator’s experience while complying to international standards for cataloging and indexing. This concern has informed the project’s key decisions over the course of the project’s development. Papers presented under this theme are encouraged to reflect on methodologies of archiving oral histories and exploring alternative methodological avenues and technical tools and the ways in which they might impact users’ experiences. Ethical questions of privacy, access, and impact of archiving subaltern voices are also of interest. 


Applicants must submit an abstract of 500 words in addition to a CV by 15 December 2018. Applications should be sent to: ifi.comms@aub.edu.lb with the subject line: POHA Conference. The conference will cover the cost of travel and accommodation for accepted papers.

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412