Students gain new appreciation for Digital Palestinian Archive in social sciences workshop

Graduate Studies faculty members, social sciences Ph.D. candidates, and humanities and social sciences master’s students took part in a two-day workshop that revolved around utilizing Birzeit University’s Digital Palestinian Archivein research and instruction. 

The workshop, held on April 12-13, 2018, was led by Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, Samera Esmir, who noted that the workshop developed new research questions that build on new documents from the archive, facilitated original research projects, and explored analytical exercises on documents sourced from the archive. 

The first day of the workshop dealt with documents related to Palestine and the Middle East, tracing their history and contextualizing their importance within the period during which state archives were established. The second day shed light on archives in Palestine and the historical research projects carried out within them.