Conference 6 - Doing Politics in Palestine: Between Alienation and Participation

This conference explores political organizational forms and political activism in Palestine and the Arab World in the wake of recent mass socio-economic and political mobilizations in the region. The conference engaged with questions of political participation and alienation as they relate to conceptual transformations and the production of hegemonic paradigms that shape political imagination and, consequently, possibilities and forms of political organization. As such, the conference seeked to provide a conceptual framework that recognizes the intersection and dynamic interplay of gender, social issues, political structures and knowledge formation.

Conference panels included an exciting set of papers that challenge us to examine the processes of de-politicization of local knowledge. 

The conference provides a forum for exploring a range of fundamental issues on “doing politics” including:

• Emerging forms of political organizing which appear to refuse more traditional forms of organization through political parties and political ideologies and the debates on the ability of these new forms to affect the political field;
• The validity of alienating dichotomies prevalent in the political realm, such as those between humankind and nature, woman and man, and knowledge and the bearer of knowledge; and

the political, economic, and cultural formations characteristic of the post-Oslo era and the ways in which the Palestinian feminist and  student movements have engaged with these formations.