I am a cultural anthropologist, and an award winning teacher, researching linkages between culture and politics in Israel in the context of the Israeli military occupation and legacy of the Palestinian dispossession. I am the author and/or editor of five books in the field of anti-colonial Israel/Palestine studies.
“…new media and communication technologies are recalibrating the Israeli relationship to its military occupation…”
My latest book, Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine, is the culmination of a multi-book project about the ways that new media and communication technologies are recalibrating the Israeli relationship to its military occupation. My first book on this topic — Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age (with Adi Kuntsman, 2015) — studied the place of social media within this equation.
Screen Shots considers the roles of digital photographic technologies and camera investments, with a focus on the multiple communities and institutions who have integrated networked image-making into their political toolbox: Palestinian and Israeli human rights workers and activists, Palestinian civilians living under occupation, the Israeli military, and the Jewish settler population.
“…the analytics of failure shines a new light on the changing terms of military occupation in the digital age…”
Screen Shots focuses on episodes of glitch and lapse in photographic practices, on curatorial and circulatory failures, arguing that the analytics of failure shines a new light on the changing terms of military occupation in the digital age, while pushing back against the recalcitrant techo-optimism that still frames much scholarship in this area.
My new project (2023) studies the changing status of wartime evidence in Israel/Palestine amidst the rise of artificial intelligence, open source intelligence (OSINT), and amateur digital forensics. This project examines how various parties and institutions across the geography of military occupation — human rights organizations, laymen internet sleuths, soldiers and militants, lawyers and legal institutions — all are changing the ways they identify and catalog, collect and compile, analyze and asses evidence of human rights violations and Israeli state violence and how the very notion of wartime evidence is changing in the process. Building on scholarly writing on the forensic turn, this project studies the new ontological thresholds for evidence in Israel/Palestine and the forms of politics that are both enabled and foreclosed.
“…the new ontological threshold for evidence in Israel/Palestine in the age of AI…and the forms of politics this enables and forecloses…”
My research and writing has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Palestinian American Research Council, and the Trent Foundation.
My popular writing on Palestine and Israel has appeared in such places as London Review of Books (Blog), Middle East Report, Open Democracy, and Los Angeles Review of Books.
Please see my Scholars@Duke profile for a comprehensive record of my academic and scholarly activities.
