RHODE ISLAND

An international symposium on the topic “Palestine: Political Cultures and the Cultures of Politics” is to be held at Brown University, March 6-7, 2015.

This, the second annual symposium of the project, New Directions in Palestinian Studies, aims to bring together established and emerging scholars in a low-pressure workshop environment to take stock of research trends, to identify promising new questions and sources, to exchange experiences and insights, and to encourage networking across disciplinary and field boundaries. Driving this effort are two questions: What does it mean to be Palestinian? And what forms of political mobilization are implicated in and made possible by knowledge production on Palestine and the Palestinians? The focus is on emerging scholars, who will present most of the papers.

(more details when available)

The Middle East Studies Program at Brown University initiated this project in 2013, in cooperation with other universities and institutes, including the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS, the European Centre for Palestine Studies at Exeter; as well as colleagues at NYU, Birzeit, and other universities. It also benefits from exploratory conversations with the Institute for Palestine Studies (including Institute for Jerusalem Studies), Mada, Muwatin, Masarat, The Jerusalem Fund & the Palestine Center, and other institutes that help shape knowledge production in this field. The first symposium, “Political Economy and the Economy of Politics,” was held in March 2014 and has generated considerable discussion. A book of selected papers is now with Stanford University Press.