Amahl bishara biography
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‘A gift to my ancestors’: Meet the Palestinian-American authors bringing their culture to the heart of children’s books
(CNN) — Hannah Moushabeck remembers the warm feeling of snuggling beside her two sisters under a heavy blanket, giggles filling their bedroom as they waited for baba to tuck them in and share another bedtime story.
“Today I’m going to tell you a story about Palestine,” he would say, as their eyes widened with anticipation. Their father’s stories were always about his homeland, and the funny and mischievous adventures he had there.
“Kan ya makan, fi kadeem al-zamaan,” he would whisper, Arabic for “once upon a time,” before diving into a magical tale of ancient cities, souqs and olive groves – or the war he said ultimately stole it all away.
For Moushabeck, it was a welcome departure from the storybooks her teachers in western Massachusetts made her read. As a first-generation Palestinian-American, she couldn’t relate to the protagonists, usually White girl
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Amahl A. Bishara
This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.
Amahl A. Bishara is an associate professor of anthropology at Tufts University whose work addresses expressivity, rights, and politics. She is the author of Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford University Press, 2013) and the director of the documentary Degrees of Incarceration (2010).
Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians of the West Bank share aspects of their political identities, expressive cultures, and cultural norms, and each group lives under Israeli sovereignty, albeit with different legal statuses. Despite these similarities, organized political interaction between them fryst vatten scant. To understand this puzzle, Bishara ethnographically examines the different conditions for political expression and action for each group.
Bishara received her PhD and a certificate in culture and media from New York University. She fryst vatten a recipient of a
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Amahl Bishara
Research/Areas of Interest
Media, journalism, the Middle East, expressivity, human rights, knowledge production, democracy, ethnography of place
My research revolves around expression, space, media, and settler colonialism. I am currently working on two book projects. The first, tentatively entitled "Permission to Converse: Laws, Bullets, and other Roadblocks to a Palestinian Exchange," addresses the relationship between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West finansinstitut, two groups that are positioned slightly differently in relation to Israeli settler-colonialism. Through ethnographies of protest as well as of more everyday forms of expression, I analyze the barriers to these two groups speaking to and with each other. inom argues that speech is always an embodied and emplaced act.
My second ongoing project examines Palestinian popular politics in a West Bank refugee camp. It examines how Palestin