Palestine Studies at University of Toronto
March 20th, 1-3pm at University of Toronto Scarborough Campus
Room Available to Registered Participants
Bio:
Rana Barakat is an associate professor in the department of history at Birzeit University and the director of BZU Museum. Her forthcoming book with University of North Carolina Press is titled: Ongoing Return: Mapping Memory and Storytelling in Palestine.
Discussion and Response from Prof. Ariel Katz (U of Toronto, Law)
Mon, Feb 24, 2025 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM EST
Fateh Azzam Is a Palestinian human rights researcher and consultant. His professional experience spanned work in civil society, philanthropy, academia and the United Nations, having served as founding director of the Asfari Institute for Civil Society and Citizenship at the American University of Beirut, Middle East Regional Representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, director of the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program at the American University in Cairo and director of the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq. He volunteers as Board Chair of Visualizing Palestine and member of the Advisory Board for the Institute for Statelessness and Inclusion in The Hague. Fateh has published studies and book chapters on human rights and humanitarian law, the responsibility to protect, the Arab and Palestinian human rights movement and citizenship in Palestine and the Arab region. He is also author of two plays, Ansar and Baggage, and most recently adapted and co-Directed The Gaza Monologues in Maine where he lives.
Register Here
Join Palestine Open Maps and Hearing Palestine for a Mapathon with Geography PhD student Majd Al-Shihabi, who guides students through creating maps of Palestine, telling the history and present reality of the land through geographic visuals. An interactive hands-on workshop where you will learn about open mapping tools and extracting data from Mandate-era maps of Palestine. No experience necessary, just bring along your fully charged laptop (and a mouse if you have one).
Date and time:
February 14, 2:00–4:00 PM
Registration link to come!
Description:
It is unfair to ask the colonized to envision an alternative future in the midst of their ongoing genocide. If there was any semblance of justice and fairness in this world, this intensified moment of genocide would not have taken place, the Palestinian refugees from 1948 onwards would have been able to return to their homes and lands, and the brutal Israeli settler colonial occupation of Palestine would have ended long ago. There is nothing fair or just about the suffering of the Palestinians for over 100 years. Throughout their long struggle, Palestinians have offered alternative visions. Though these visions have been marginalized, silenced, and erased, continuing to offer them is necessary because if such a vision does not come from the colonized, then where is it going to come from? Today, the US, Israel, and their allies are pushing through their vision, which is one of continuing genocide and the complete elimination of Palestinian sovereignty, where Palestinians will come to practice self-administration over 5% to 8% of historic Palestine, becoming a minority in the lands between the river and the sea. The overwhelming majority of the world’s states continue to push the vision of a two-state solution along the 1967 borders with Palestinians practicing full rights of self-determination within those borders but without the Palestinian right of return to 1948 lands. For different reasons, neither vision constitutes decolonial liberation. Against both, this presentation offers an alternative vision that is based on what I call, decolonial sovereignties, a form of sovereignty that is layered, shared, and multiplying in its practice and aspirations. The presentation will look at the long struggle, not by looking back, but by looking forward, understanding that the realization of this alternative world is decades ahead. The urgent task at hand is to stop the genocide, not just this specific genocidal operation, but the structure of genocide, which is none other than the structure of Israeli settler colonial sovereignty itself. In doing so, we must simultaneously advance decolonial sovereignties as the alternative and as the project that demands our long term commitment and fidelity.
Dr. Muhannad Ayyash was born and raised in Silwan, Al-Quds, before immigrating to Canada, where he is Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University. He is also a policy analyst at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. He is the author of A Hermeneutics of Violence (UTP, 2019), and his forthcoming book is titled Lordship and Liberation in Palestine-Israel: The Promise of Decolonial Sovereignties. He has published several academic articles on topics such as political violence, Zionism and colonial modernity, settler colonial sovereignty, anti-Palestinian racism, and Palestinian decolonial movements in journals such as the European Journal of International Relations, the European Journal of Social Theory, Distinktion, Critical Sociology, and Middle East Critique. He has co-edited two books, the most recent with Jeremy Wildeman titled, Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine. He is also the author of multiple book chapters, and has written opinion pieces for Al-Jazeera, The Baffler, Middle East Eye, Mondoweiss, and The Breach, among others.
Tuesday, December 03, 2024 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm
MN Grand Hall, University of Toronto Mississauga
Rebecca Wittmann (University of Toronto)
Omer Bartov (Brown University)
Esmat Elhalaby (University of Toronto)
He left the house to buy some bread for his kids.
News of his death made it home,
but not the bread.
No bread.
— Under the Rubble, by Mosab Abu Toha
Rebecca Wittmann is Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the Holocaust and postwar Germany, trials of Nazi perpetrators and terrorists, and German legal history. Her book, Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial won the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History. Her edited volume, The Eichmann Trial Reconsidered, has recently been published with the University of Toronto Press.
Omer Bartov was born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony’s College, Oxford. His early research concerned the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and the crimes it committed in World War II, analyzed in his books, The Eastern Front, 1941-1945 (1985), and Hitler’s Army (1991). Bartov’s new book, Genocide, The Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis, has just come out. He is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University.
Esmat Elhalaby is an Assistant Professor of Transnational History at the University of Toronto. Parting Gifts of Empire, his book on Palestine, India, and the intellectual history of decolonization, is forthcoming next year from the University of California Press. Elhalaby has held postdoctoral fellowships at UC Davis and NYU Abu Dhabi.
This event is open to all members of the University of Toronto community. (Please bring your T-cards.)
Registration Link: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/under-the-rubble-history-and-memory-in-israe…
