Introduction to Palestine Studies: History, Land, Resistance, and Justice

Catalog description

This course is an undergraduate general education “Palestine Studies” course that draws on “interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary”. Palestine studies that engage with critical ethnic studies, settler-colonial studies, critical media literacy studies, gender, sexuality, and queer studies, and decolonial Arab feminisms as set of knowledges, methodologies, and practices. It also draws on an array of historical content published by Palestinian and Palestine Studies scholars and Palestinians’ lived experiences represented in oral history studies, and cultural creations such as film, visual art, music, etc. and world media. The course is structured to connect the themes addressed throughout the semester by going back and forth from the critical historical moments in Palestinian history to the ongoing and contemporary Palestinian displacement, resistance, and struggles for freedom, justice, and the right of return to the land of their ancestors. The course aims to help participants understand how the Zionist form of settler-colonialism in Palestine is interlocked with settler-colonialism as an ongoing practice in the USA and other parts of the world. It also addresses the worldwide influence of settler-colonialism on the lives of colonized/gendered/racialized peoples, land theft and extraction, flow of capital, incarceration/detentions, mobility across borders, militarism and wars, mega sports events, and cultural and knowledge creation.