Hanan has been a Teaching Fellow at SOAS, University of London since 2009. She has taught and lectured on the politics and government of the Middle East in the Politics Department as well as the mediated cultures of the Middle East at the Center for Media and Film Studies. She has also guest-lectured at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently a CBRL Post-doctoral Visiting Research Fellow at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem. From September 2012 she will be a EUME Post-doctoral Fellow at the Forum for Transregional Studies in Berlin. She has researched and written on cultural politics, visual cultures, traveling theory, globalism/localism, and international aid. She received her PhD from SOAS University in 2011.

Seminar: “Reclaiming the Political: Visual Production and the Transformative Politics of Everyday”
Sunday 29 July, from 10:00 to 12:00– Campus in Camps Al Feneiq Center, Deheishe Refugee Camp

This seminar aims to converse with some of the conceptualizations related to the politics of aesthetics, the public performance of affect and the politics of cultural production. It aims to do so by considering the potentials held within possibly already existing radical emancipatory practices underwritten by the specific social and political realities related to visual production in Dheisheh Camp. The seminar will be structured around group discussions inspired by the following questions:

1) Under what circumstances does the creation and mediation of visual cultural production resist and/or reinforce existing power dynamics?

2) Taking the different forms of visual production in the camps as case studies, what signifiers can we locate within some of these images and their circulation? What do they imply? What might be their political function in reality? In what ways are they rendering what is invisible to the eye, visible?

3) How has visual artistic production within the Palestinian context more broadly tended to engage with oppression historically? What kinds of tensions/patterns of thought have recently emerged from artwork on the Apartheid wall as well as the walls of different cities and camps since the first Intifadah?

4) How do these tensions reflect the different articulations of camp residents’ right to resist Israeli oppression while simultaneously instrumentalising their own spatial dynamics to make for improvements in their own daily lives?

Reading Materials

Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces [ENG]

Can artistic practices still play a critical role in a society where the difference between art and advertizing…

Art is Going Elsewhere and Politics has to Catch it [ENG]

There are two ways of thinking. There is the thinking of the poor, which is the expression of his condition…

Life As Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East [ENG]

The essays compiled in this volume are about agency and change in the Muslim Middle East, the societies in which religion seems…

Subjective Atlas of Palestine [ENG]

Sometime in the 1980s, a Japanese artist interviewed by a Palestinian journalist was quoted as saying…

On Dance Identity and War [ENG]

In the middle of our regular dance rehearsal, our second since the end of the latest Israeli assault, a group of Belgian artists…

The Writing on the Walls [ENG]

One of the most striking features of the cultural landscape of the occupied West Bank at the height of the intifada…

Palestinian Graffiti spreads message of Peace [ENG]

Emblazoned on a long, tall, concrete barrier in the midst of a rocky Middle Eastern landscape…

Related Videos

Seminar: Reclaiming the Political by Hanan Toukan – Part 1

Seminar: Reclaiming the Political by Hanan Toukan – Part 2

More Videos at http://www.youtube.com/campusincamps