28 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Beneath the Concrete: Camp, Colony, Palestine
This dissertation is a material-archival history of the Palestinian refugee camp. Its primary claim is that to read Palestine-Israel one must read the camp; the refugee camp, I argue, is the settlercolony’s irreducible foil. How, then, has the question of the camps (neither synonymous with nor reducible to the ‘refugee problem’) exerted its own gravitational force on Palestinian, Israeli, and humanitarian politics? What kind of historical relation is there, I ask, between camp-form and that spatial form from which it seems inseparable—the colony? Working with a range of textual and visual documents (from bureaucratic reports to prose fiction and architectural drawings) drawn from four different archives, I argue that the Palestinian camps lie at the center of the foundational-temporal impasse of the Israeli state—its inability to decisively render the moment of its inception as past. In other words, my argument is that the camp sits not only at the intersection of the most critical biopolitical sites of the settler- colonial—the colonized body and its movements, land and its possession in regimes of property and ownership—but, and perhaps even more consequentially, at the point of their temporal resolution in definite and final forms. Camp and colony are entangled from the start; co-produced in the double movement of dispossession and substitution, un-homing and homing; twinned but inversed topologies of the freedom of movement
Where is urban politics?
We outline the rationale for reopening the issue of the spatiality of the ‘urban’ in urban politics. There is a long tradition of arguing about the distinctive political qualities of urban sites, practices and processes. Recent work often relies on spatial concepts or metaphors that anchor various political phenomena to cities while simultaneously putting the specificity of the urban itself in question. This symposium seeks to extend debates about the relationship between the urban and the political. Instead of asking ‘what is urban politics?’, seeking a definition of the urban as a starting point we begin by asking ‘where is urban politics?’. This question orients all of the contributions to this symposium, and it allows each to trace diverse political dimensions of urban life and living beyond the confines of ‘the city’ as classically conceived. The symposium engages with ‘the urban question’ through diverse settings and objects, including infrastructures, in-between spaces, professional cultures, transnational and postcolonial spaces and spaces of sovereignty. Contributions draw on a range of intellectual perspectives, including geography, urban studies, political science and political theory, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, planning and environmental studies — indicating the range of intellectual traditions that can and do inform the investigation of the urban/political nexus