Panel Discussion | Lebanon, Syria and Palestine: Colonial Histories between a Durable Presence and Present

Lecture Room A, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, NIG Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna, 20 May 2019, 5 – 7 pm .

The panel discussion engages with questions on how and why colonial histories matter in the Middle East (hereafter ‘West Asia’) today? Posed by anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler, these questions serve as a call for finding alternative analytical and methodological concepts to capture the durable colonial marks that exist in our presence/present. Following Stoler’s critique of scholars who romanticise traces of this violent past, the panel will present new research and tools of investigation that engage deep colonial fault lines in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine today.

Speakers

Helene Kazan’s (Completed her Ph.D. at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London (2019), and is a 2018-2020 Vera List Center Fellow on Art and Politics, New School, New York) inter- disciplinary and multi-media practice investigates risk through an analysis of international law, architecture, and the human experience of violence, observed and argued through the frame of ‘poetic testimony’.

Adriana Qubaia (Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Gender Studies, Central European University) is an anthropologist of Lebanon working on mapping contemporary political and socio-economic factors that shape the negotiation of gendered non-normative sexualities in Beirut. Therefore, she challenges dominant theoretical frameworks used to conceptualize gendered sexualities in West Asia.

Mette Edith Lundsfryd Stendevad (Ph.D. interdisciplinary candidate in Sociology and History at the School of Media, Communication and Sociology, University of Leicester) enriches these diverse approaches through her extended work on oral history accounts from Palestinian women from Syria (some still living in Syria, some scattered in different European countries or beyond) speaking back to the ongoing history of violence in Syria, eviction from historic Palestine, forced separation, statelessness and borders

Concept and Moderation

Klaudia Rottenschlager (Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna),
Noura Salah Adeen (Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences)

We invite the audience to participate in a feminist/intersectional, transdisciplinary conversation on how these specific research projects can speak to each other through a common understanding of colonial affect. The event is accessible for wheelchairs and will be held in English. Child care can be provided upon request. For further information please contact [email protected] and [email protected].