Making Sense of Palestine Today: A Panel (Part 3)

This panel is Part 3 of a series of three panels.

Featured SpeakersMuna Dajani (London School of Economics)Basma Fahoum (Stanford University)

“Making Sense of Palestine Today: a Panel.” Shira Robinson, Karam Dana, Dana El Kurd, Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins , Muna Dajani and Basma Fahoum will discuss recent events in Palestine across three sessions: Wednesday, May 26 at 4:00pm (Pacific), Wednesday June 2 at 12:00pm (Pacific), and Thursday, June 3 at 12:00pm (Pacific).

Shira Robinson is Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University. She works on the social and cultural history of the Modern Middle East, with an emphasis on colonialism, citizenship, nationalism, and cultures of militarism after World War I. She joined GW in 2007 after two years of teaching at the University of Iowa and one year as Visiting Fellow at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. She received her B.A. in Middle Eastern and North African Studies from the University of Michigan and her M.A. and Ph.D. in History from Stanford University.

Karam Dana is Associate Professor at the University of Washington: “My scholarship explores the evolution of transnational political identities and their impact on civic engagement and political participation, with a focus on Palestinians and American Muslims. As an interdisciplinary social scientist, I examine social contexts related to religion, identity, and politics to describe, explain, and provide answers to persisting theoretical and policy questions.

Dana El Kurd is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Richmond. She received her PhD in Government from The University of Texas at Austin in June 2017. She specializes in Comparative Politics and International Relations.  She is interested in the conflicts between states and their societies and the contentious politics they produce. She examines how authoritarian regimes try to implement policies and how external intervention may affect their success.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bard College. Her research centers around infrastructure, discard studies, science and environment, climate change, colonialism and postcoloniality, austerity, the “sharing economy,” property, housing, the Middle East, and Europe. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2020), explores what happens when, as Palestinians are increasingly forced into proximity with their own wastes and with those of their occupiers, waste is transformed from “matter out of place,” per prevailing anthropological wisdom, into matter with no place to go—or its own ecology.

Muna Dajani holds an MSc in International Development and Environment from the University of Manchester and a BSc in Civil Engineering from Birzeit University in Palestine. For over 9 years, Muna has worked in the fields of environment and development in Palestine, working with grassroots initiatives, NGOs, universities and governmental bodies on social and environmental assessments, hydropolitics, advocacy and community participation.

Basma Fahoum is a PhD candidate in History at Stanford. She holds an MA in culture research from Tel Aviv University.  She is currently working on the history of tobacco cultivation in Palestine in the late Ottoman and British Mandatory periods, as well as in Israel.  She is also interested in the history of capitalism, and in histories of informal/illegal economic activities.