Palestine: Fieldnotes on Life in Pandemic Times
Fieldnotes on Life in Pandemic Times was created to highlight a Palestinian prism through which to view a global understanding of the contemporary social and political moment through the everyday experiences of COVID in Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora. The call for submissions is still ongoing, and encourages traditional as well as informal and experimental pieces. For more information on how to submit click here.
Nayrouz Abu Hatoum, Concordia University and Sarah Ihmoud, The College of the Holy Cross, Series Editors, on behalf of the A'tabeh/Threshold Committee.
A City of Commerce in a Time of Plague
By Sary Zananiri
We are delighted to launch the series, Palestine: Fieldnotes on Life in Pandemic Times, with an essay by Netherlands-based artist and cultural historian Sary Zananiri, “A City of Commerce in a Time of Plague,” which chronicles the author’s walks through the Old City of Jerusalem, shifting between historical insights, childhood memories, contemporary ethnographic observations and hauntingly beautiful photography.
Displacement and Solidarity: Lessons from Palestine to California
By Gabi Kirk
We are delighted to share with you the second essay of our series Palestine: Fieldnotes on Life in Pandemic Times, Displacement and Solidarity: Lessons from Palestine to California by Gabi Kirk, Ph.D. candidate in Geography at UC Davis. The essay, which begins by reflecting on Kirk's inability to reach Palestine for fieldwork due to COVID-19, considers possibilities for a deepened sense of affective connection and transnational solidarity with Palestinians in a time where, as her interlocutor Omar poses, the rest of the world is now "facing the movement restrictions and economic precarity that have become normalized in Gaza under siege."
By Apran Roy
We are delighted to share with you the third essay of our series Palestine: Fieldnotes on Life in Pandemic Times, Hallucinations by Arpan Roy, Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology a John Hopkins University.
I arrived in Madrid after a year and a half of fieldwork in Palestine just in time for quarantine. Not much in Elias’s apartment indicated that I had ever left Palestine. His library, a relic of his days as a PhD student in economics, must be one of the most extensive in Spain on the topic of Israel/ Palestine—The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the works of Edward Said, the literary theory of Salma Jayyusi, works of Arabic fiction in translation: Kanafani, Khoury, Habibi, obviously Mahmoud Darwish. Over the toilet, of all places, hangs tatreez.
Photography: Ali Jadallah ©