Call for Applicants: 2020-21 PARC Research and Travel Fellowships

Call for Applicants: 2020-21 PARC Research and Travel Fellowships

Call for Applicants: 2020-21 PARC Research and Travel Fellowships

By : Palestinian American Research Center (PARC)

The Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) is announcing its annual travel and fellowship competition.

2020-2021 NEH/FPIRI Fellowshipsfor Scholars Conducting Field-Based Humanities Research in Palestine
(Applications due 13 January 2020)

PARC announces its 8th National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions (FPIRI) competition for research in the humanities or research that embraces a humanistic approach and methods. Fellowship awards are a minimum of four and a maximum of eight consecutive months for scholars who have earned their PhD or have completed their professional training. Applicants must be U.S. citizens or have lived in the U.S. for three years immediately preceding the application deadline. Fellowship awards are for $4,200 per month of research. Applications are due January 13, 2020. For more information, please visit our website: http://parc-us-pal.org/.

2020 Media Development Seminar on Palestine
(24 June – 7 July 2020 in Jerusalem and the West Bank)

PARC announces its 4th Media Development Seminar (MDS) on Palestine competition for U.S. faculty members with a demonstrated interest in, but little travel experience to, Palestine. Applicants must be from fields related to journalism, film, communications, or media. The Program will host 10 to 12 U.S. faculty members to participate in roundtable discussions; visits to university media departments, local media outlets, and cultural and civil society organizations; tours of historic cities; as well as meetings with Palestinian colleagues. Through these activities, participants will learn about the region, deepen their knowledge of media in and about Palestine, and build relationships with Palestinian colleagues and institutions. The MDS program dates for 2020 are June 24 – July 7, 2020. Applications are due January 23, 2020. For more information, please visit our website: http://parc-us-pal.org/.

2020 Faculty Development Seminar on Palestine
(3 June - 16 June 2020 in Jerusalem and the West Bank)


The Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) announces its 11
th annual Faculty Development Seminar (FDS) on Palestine competition for U.S. faculty members with a demonstrated interest in, but little travel experience to, Palestine. Applicants may come from any field of study. The program will host 10 to 12 U.S. faculty members to participate in roundtable discussions; visits to Palestinian universities, research institutes, and cultural institutions; tours of historic cities; as well as meetings with Palestinian colleagues. Through these activities, participants willlearn about the region, deepen their knowledge about their fields of interest in Palestine, and build relationships with Palestinian colleagues and institutions.

 

Further Details Below

2020-2021 NEH/FPIRI Fellowshipsfor Scholars Conducting Field-Based Humanities Research in Palestine


Application due 13 January 2020

Fellowship awards are $4,200 per month for a minimum of four and a maximum of eight months of research


Information about the fellowship:

  • Fields of study include, but are not limited to, history, philosophy, comparative religion, literature, languages and linguistics, archaeology and jurisprudence. In addition, research that embraces a humanistic approach and methods will be considered.Applicants must be scholars who have earned their PhD or completed their professional training.

  • Applicants must propose a minimum of four and a maximum of eight consecutive months of research that takes place in the West Bank.

  • Selected fellows must work on their research full- time during their period of funding.

  • Applicants must be U.S. citizens or foreign. Nationals who have lived in the United States for a minimum of three years immediately preceding the application deadline.


For complete information, visit PARC’s website at http://parc-us-pal.org/
.  

Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities under the Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions

2020 Media Development Seminar on Palestine


24 June - 7 July 2020 in Jerusalem and the West Bank


Applicants must:

  • Be U.S. citizens.

  • Be faculty members at recognized U.S. colleges or universities. Applicants must be professors in journalism, film, communications, media, or related departments at their universities.

  • Have a demonstrated interest in Palestine.

  • Have little previous travel experience to Palestine.

  • Be willing to integrate their experiences from the seminar into their own teaching and/or pursue a joint research project or publication with a Palestinian colleague.

  • Be a member of PARC. Visit the PARC membership page of the PARC website for more information.


PARC will make all arrangements for the program including hotel, site visits, tours, and meetings with Palestinian colleagues. PARC will cover all expenses for in-country, group ground travel, accommodations, and group meals. International travel and personal and free day expenses will be the responsibility of each faculty member and/or her/his/their university. In cases of demonstrated need, there is limited funding available to cover partial costs for international travel. 

Program contingent upon funding.

For complete information, visit PARC’s website at http://parc-us-pal.org/.

2020 Faculty Development Seminar on Palestine


3 June - 16 June 2020 in Jerusalem and the West Bank

Applicants must:
 

  • Be U.S. citizens.
  • Be full-time faculty members at recognized U.S. colleges or universities. Applicants may come from any academic discipline, including the humanities, social sciences, economics, law, health, and sciences.
  • Have a demonstrated interest in Palestine.
  • Have little previous travel experience to Palestine.
  • Be willing to integrate their experiences from the seminar into their own teaching and/or pursue a joint research project or publication with a Palestinian colleague.
  • Be a member of PARC. Visit the PARC membership page of the PARC website for more information.

PARC will make all arrangements for the program, including hotel, site visits, tours, and meetings with Palestinian colleagues. PARC will cover all expenses for in-country, group ground travel, accommodations, and group meals. International travel and personal and free day expenses will be the responsibility of each faculty member and/or her/his/their university. In cases of demonstrated need, there is limited funding available to cover partial costs for international travel.  Professors from Minority Serving Institutions and Community Colleges are especially encouraged to apply. PARC will provide three travel stipends up to $1,000 each for airfare for professors from Minority Serving Institutions and/or Community Colleges.  

Funding for these three participants is provided by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs through an agreement with CAORC. 

For complete information, visit PARC’s website at http://parc-us-pal.org/.

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