Panel Discussion Ushers in Special Journal Edition on Palestine

Birzeit University’s Public Relations Office organized a panel discussion entitled, “Life Writing from Palestine: Invasions, Incarceration, and Insurgent Imagination,” on March 11, 2015.  The panel coincided with the publication of a special issue on Palestine by the interdisciplinaryquarterly Biography, which is published by the University of Hawaii Press for the Biographical Research Center.

The special issue relates everyday but extraordinary stories about Palestinians in light of Zionist efforts to delegitimize, disempower and eliminate them. It does so through a variety of life narratives that include diaries, letters, Facebook updates, oral histories, memoirs, interviews, poetry verse, and photographs.

The issue embodies resistance, as contributors write in English for an international journal coming out of a US university, and through the many people who worked together to create this special issue are of different nationalities, races, ethnicities, and religions. The edition challenges the false and deadly divisions that make up apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and occupation, while also offering visions of life together in free Palestine.

Contributors to this special issue represent history from a Palestinian perspectives through a collective testimony developed in concert with editors from different institutional and geographic locations, and from different national, racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds.

For more, see http://www.birzeit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/life-in-occupied-palestine-02.pdf & www.birzeit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/life-in-occupied-palestine.pdf