Before Everything Fell Apart When people outside Gaza say the war is over, nineteen-year-old Nour Al-Ajla doesn’t know what to make of it. “Maybe it’s over for them,” she says quietly, “but not for me. My war still wakes me … Continue reading “The War Is Over, But Mine Is Not: Nour’s Story”
Urban renewal means Negro removal. –James Baldwin The concept of gentrification was pioneered by the sociologist Ruth Glass (1912-1990) to depict rapidly upscaling London neighborhoods in the 1950s. What she had earlier called a “middle class invasion” became more … Continue reading “Kushnerism: Gaza Gentrification Means Palestinian Genocide”
Students are often the first to remind the rest of the university that classrooms and campuses are not rehearsal spaces protected from a “real world” but are the very site at which to world-build against capitalism and coloniality. The current … Continue reading “Scholasticide and the Securitized State: Recontextualizing the Student Intifada”
October 4, 2025 Headquartered at Tel Aviv University, the Dan David Prize is one of many Israel-based awards that attempt to legitimize the Israeli state and its policies on a world stage. Along with the Wolf Prize, awarded to “Scientists … Continue reading “The Dan David Prize Amid a Genocide?”
In my undergraduate course Criticism: Theory and Practice, at Birzeit University—a course that introduces students to the building blocks of literary form—we read A. E. Housman’s poem “The Grizzly Bear.” The Housman poem reads: The Grizzly Bear is huge and … Continue reading “From the Classroom to Gaza: Belated Narratives and the Shared Struggle for Freedom”
How should an anti-Zionist Jew respond to the genocide in Gaza and its ramifications? This was the subject of my book To See in the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7 (2025). It was published on January 20, … Continue reading “Undefeated Despair”
In March 2025, comrades from across the San Franciso Bay Area and beyond gathered across two facilitated convergence spaces to host Nick Mirzoeff and explore his concept of “seeing in the dark,” a provocation currently in circulation through his recently … Continue reading “Visual Activism C-Map”
All day, the talk is lint. Committees meet and look at their calendars. The carpet hardly moves. The lobby doesn’t even smell of corpses. It’s Monday here. There’s a salad bar here. In Rafah, a wall is blown off … Continue reading “The Clock Men”
Look at the world that was blind to us before and how it sees us now. –Ibrahim Nasrallah, translated by Huda J. Fakhreddine, Palestinian: Four Poems Here are some notes from the two days of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s Bay Area … Continue reading ““All-over-the-placelessness”: I Read To See in the Dark from the Inside Out”
I would like to take this opportunity to contextualize Nicholas Mirzoeff’s To See in the Dark as part of VAGABONDS, the series of short, pamphlet-like books I edit for Pluto Press. I founded VAGABONDS in 2020 based on three frustrations. … Continue reading “A Vagabond in the Rubble, a Book in the Dark”
In February 2024, I was invited by Lisa Stuckey and Alexander Damianisch to contribute a short entry to their publication Uncertain Curiosity in Artistic Research, Philosophy, Media and Cultural Studies: Transforming Understanding—Understanding Transformation about concepts developed by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. … Continue reading “Potentializing Palestine: Gaza Bursts Open the Imperial Shutter”
In this important conversation and dossier about ways to enact transnational feminist solidarity with Palestinians from the perspective of women scholars from the Middle East and Asia, I share my insights on war and imperialism in Afghanistan. I comparatively explore … Continue reading “Livestreaming and Deadstreaming: On the Optics, Politics, and Effects of Violent Imagery in Comparative Perspective”
This essay was my contribution to the panel Global and Transnational Approaches to Race and Racism at the Inaugural British Journal of Sociology Conference, 15-16 April 2024 at the London School of Economics. I am grateful to Ghada Majadli and … Continue reading “Social Theory after* Gaza? Witnessing the Transnational Circuits of Race-Making”
The so-called global Left, especially within the settlercolonial US-Canadian scene, is discombobulated. “End the Occupation” and “From the River to the Sea,” like Tahrir Square’s 2011 Orientalized so-called Arab Spring chant “Bread, Freedom, and Social Justice,” have turned into prophetic … Continue reading “It Is a Racial-Religious War: Organizing and a 1492 Transnational Movement Framing”
