Marybelle Issa, "Artistic Interventions in Times of Struggle: Resistance and (Re)Imagination Within the Palestinian Context"
Art has historically been at the center of resistance and has been studied as forms of protest (Lorde, 1988; Scott, 1986, 1990; Rich, 1993; Peteet, 1996; Vinthagen & Johansson, 2013, 2019; Awad, et al., 2017, among many others). In the Palestinian context for example, a call to freedom united artists across diverse creative fields during the First Intifada (1989), resulting in influential works merging symbolism and realism in the aesthetic articulation of Palestinian experiences (example: New Visions group). More recently, as Palestinians face unprecedented violence at the hands of the Israeli state, art serves as a major force in the expression of experiences across the diaspora. Beyond providing an aesthetic and intellectual dimension to processes of recovery and rebuilding in times of devastation, art serves “as a medium through which relationships with power and authority are formed” (Darkhabani, 2025). As such, art can be a generative way of thinking about liberation and can serve as a lens through which resistance is fostered. In writing on the necessity of art in post-Assad Syria, Syrian architect Ahmad Darkhabani defends that “only through art’s fragility and elasticity can we make sense of the incomprehensible conditions and insanity we have endured”. If art can serve as an expression of personal and collective views on a world in crisis, then what role does it play in resisting these conditions?
From a linguistic anthropological lens, this early-stage project proposal explores art as a cultural artifact and a potential communicative tool. It explores artistic interventions across the Palestinian diaspora as forms of (re)narrativization and (re)inscription of the self in times of erasure. Using a semiotic approach to better understand the political and symbolic meaning that art can generate in the world, this project addresses the following central question: what does art narrate and can it serve to imagine new ways of living, being and thinking about identity, life, and liberation beyond the constraints of catastrophe?
Mikaila Rummage, ""I Am Still Alive:" Bisan's Journalism as Livingness"
Since 7 October 2023, Palestinians in Gaza have experienced a rapid intensification of violence by the occupying Israeli forces, but their persisting, steadfast existence informs us, as observers to this crisis, of alternative modes of resistance. Through an analysis of Bisan Owda’s citizen journalism and her tireless work to document the genocide of her people, I demonstrate a genealogy of multimodal forms of resistance to erasure that are emblematic of the Palestinian ethic of sumud (steadfastness) and provide an example of McKittrick’s theorizing on livingness (2021). Further, Owda’s self-representation subverts narrow Western constructions of what Palestinian womanhood should look and sound like. Despite algorithms of oppression (Noble 2018) on social media that aid in both the censorship of Palestinian voices and the maintenance of a violent world order, I highlight how Bisan’s daily-to-weekly return to social media to inform the world that she is, indeed, still alive is indicative of liberatory Palestinian speculative futures; despite ongoing crises, displacements, and the weight of apartheid, Palestinians maintain the hope of emancipation, to return to the whole of their homeland. As Bisan boldly speaks truth to power, I contend that Bisan’s livingness and method of dissent is nested in her voicing, even as the threats of the war machine loom large over journalists in the Gaza Strip. Bisan’s online documentation that will forever showcase both the atrocities experienced by Palestinians and their relational care for human and non-human life under bombardment is made monument to the struggle for liberation.
Minh Hyunh Vu, "“there is less and less living room”: On the shifting shapes of crisis and the politics of refurbishment"
Writing amidst the 1982 Lebanon War and the ongoing Palestinian struggle for life and liberation, June Jordan observes how “there is less and less living room” due to the colonial encroachments of “bulldozer[s],” “observation posts,” and “soldiers.” The “living room” Jordan mentions, though, does not refer to a delineated space of the domicile/domesticity. It is not an actual living room; it is just living room: an amorphous shape diffusing across borders—of the nation, of the Human—and bringing relations of uneven life/death to close proximity, despite the sundering and siloing logics of colonial violence.
This paper is a meditation on the vital methods of living that emerge amidst and against the unlivable conditions of crisis manufactured by empire. I intend to move through a series of case studies on the everyday politics of refurbishment: the makeshift couches made by incarcerated Japanese American internees who were given “nothing but a big room”; the rearrangements around the Kitchen Table Series by Carrie Mae Weems; the bookcases and supply centers of student encampments across universities; and the blueprints for liberation by Palestinian martyrs and fighters. These ongoing acts of refurbishment—at the cusp of refuse and refusal—constitute what Christina Sharpe calls “beauty as a method,” which is “a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness.” Altogether, these acts of refurbishment orient us toward other geographies and geometries of care despite the “less and less living room” of the present world.
In her notebook, Jordan asks herself: “How to design tables and chairs for a really new life?” Altogether, this paper gathers its texts and theories as a series of overlapping blueprints that can inform us not just how to “imagine” otherwise, but how to inhabit otherwise, right here and now. These are some "designs of Revolution" (Jordan) that force us to reorient ourselves and "see in discrete angles, planes, plots" (Sharpe).
