2024 Works-In-Progress

Robin Gabriel is a fifth-year Ph.D candidate in the Sociology department with a designated emphasis in CRES and FMST. Her work contemplates how Palestinian-American youth use poetry to imagine and craft alternative, decolonial futures, critique colonial systems of knowledge, and organize alongside other global and local anti-colonial movements.

Project description: My dissertation (tentatively titled 'Poetry is Not a Luxury': Decoloniality and Palestinian American Youth Activism) analyzes the Palestinian Youth Movement's (PYM) annual Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Anthology, regarding it as an archived of exiled Palestinian youth's art and activism on Turtle Island. I argue that the articulation of poetry with youth and exile functions to call into question simplistic notions of time (in terms of generation, history, and progress) and space (particularly the national), and thus the project of liberation more broadly. For this session, I will be sharing pieces of my project that deal with questions of youth and resistance, which may ultimately materialize as a chapter, or be threaded throughout the project.

Jenny Kelly is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her first book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine (Duke University Press, 2023), is a multi-sited interdisciplinary study of solidarity tourism in Palestine that shows how solidarity tourism has emerged in Palestine as an organizing strategy that is both embedded in and working against histories of sustained displacement. Her next project, co-edited with Somdeep Sen (Rothskilde University) and Lila Sharif (Arizona State University) is Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine, the next volume in the Detours Series at Duke University Press after the inaugural Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaii. She is also a Founding Collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and UCSC's Faculty for Justice in Palestine. 

Abstract: Christian Zionism, Displacement, and the Role of Travel

A central tenet of Falwell's Moral Majority, founded in 1979, was unequivocal support for Israel and by 1983 he began his first of many "Friendship Tours to Israel," which included meetings with government officials and tours of Israeli military installations. Today, Christian Zionism tours follow this template, pairing pilgrimage with celebrations of Israel's sustained displacement of Palestinians. At the center of displacement in Jerusalem, for example, is a biblical theme park - run by settlers - planned for Silwan that comprises a cable car, a seven story Jewish cultural center on Wadi Hilweh land, and shopping centers and homes for settlers. And, during this current genocidal war on Gaza, Christian Zionists across the U.S. are once again calling for unchecked Israeli control over all of Palestine. In this paper, I show both how tourism is never a thing apart from colonial state violence and how central Christian Zionist tourism is to Israel's ongoing Nakba.