Wednesday, December 18, 2024, 7 pm Palestine time
Prof. Nadia Abu El-Haj (Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University)
Title: After Humanitarism
Abstract: In the ruins of Gaza lie not just the destruction of the post-war “International Order”, as many are arguing, but also, the exposure of fatal contradictions built into its very foundation. In this talk, I explore Israel’s genocidal war and consider how, in the face of all the slaughter and destruction live-streamed every day for over a year, there can remain any doubt about Israel’s “intentions.”
Bio: Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies. Prof. Abu El-Haj is the recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Among other publications, she is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (University of Chicago Press, 2001), which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002; The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America (Verso, 2022).