Detours Palestine: Genocide in Gaza Teach-In with Professors Jennifer Lynn Kelly (UCSC) and Lila Sharif (ASU)

Co-sponsored by the UCR Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies (GSST), Decolonizing Humanism (?) Program Stream at the UCR Center for Ideas & Society, and the Memory & Resistance Laboratory

In this virtual teach-in, Professors Jennifer Lynn Kelly and Lila Sharif will draw from their published work and their forthcoming co-edited volume Detours Palestine (https://www.dukeupress.edu/detours) to contextualize the unfolding genocide on Gaza. Centering the work and everyday lives of Palestinians documenting and writing about the everyday horrors in Gaza, Professors Kelly and Sharif will amplify the pedagogy of those teaching life in between bombs, and those risking– and losing— their lives to document their displacement and death. In doing so, Professors Kelly and Sharif reckon with what it means to be a “witness” to the destructive consequences of ongoing settler dispossession in Palestine, and to consider the ways that Gaza emerges to consolidate global humanity in the face of overwhelming dehumanization and genocide.

Bios:

Jennifer Lynn Kelly is an Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research broadly engages questions of settler colonialism, U.S. empire, and the fraught politics of both tourism and solidarity. 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 Hawai'i. She is also a Founding Collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and a Steering Committee Member for UCSC’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine.

Dr. Lila Sharif is a creative writer, researcher, and assistant professor at the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She is currently writing a book about the ways in which fair trade economies, settler colonialism, environmental destruction, and storytelling converge at Palestine's historic olive tree, which has been harvested by Palestinians for over 6,000 years. Through a Palestinian Indigenous methodology that integrates food, land, and culture, and people, Sharif develops the concept of Vanishment to critique economies based in third world "recognition" and ongoing Israeli settler colonialism. Sharif researches and publishes on environmental justice, Indigenous epistemologies, and ethnic and racial studies, and is also a published poet. Recently Sharif co-authored Departures (UC Press, 2022), with the Critical Refugee Studies Collective and is currently co-editing The Sage Encyclopedia of Refugee Studies and a sequel to Departures. She is also currently co-editing A Decolonial Guidebook to Historic Palestine Dr. Jenny Kelley and Dr. Somdeep Sen. Dr. Sharif is a co-founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective as well as the Palestinian Feminist Collective. She is the first Palestinian to earn a Ph.D. in ethnic studies, and holds a dual PhD in Sociology and Ethnic Studies.