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SUMMARY:'Facts on the Ground' and the Subversion of the Global in Israeli 
 Activism - Fiona Wright\, PhD Candidate\, Department of Social Anthropolog
 y\, University of Cambridge
DTSTART:20111010T120000Z
DTEND:20111010T130000Z
UID:TALK32815@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:20884
DESCRIPTION:This is a CGHR Research Group seminar\, for more information s
 ee: \nhttp://www.polis.cam.ac.uk/cghr/research_research_group.html.\n\nHow
  do Israeli left-wing and human rights activists imagine the conflict in w
 hich they live and against which they struggle? Considering the concept of
  ‘facts on the ground’ - more commonly associated with the nationalist
  settlement enterprise in Israel/Palestine (El-Haj 2002) - as a lens throu
 gh which to view opposition to the occupation and ongoing conflict\, this 
 paper will examine the spaces in and through which activists understand an
 d struggle against their surroundings. This research\, based on ethnograph
 ic fieldwork with an Israeli human rights organisation and other activist 
 groups\, addresses the intersections of globalised vocabularies such as hu
 man rights with the particular concepts and experiences Israeli activists 
 share with a reality they strive to contest. Part of a cosmopolitan elite 
 and reflecting this in terms of their perceived detachment from the ‘Isr
 aeli mainstream’\, Jewish Israeli activists also struggle with and again
 st the discourses of victimhood\, privilege and the desire to escape\, of 
 those around them. Through an examination of activist spaces - meetings\, 
 demonstrations\, tours\, conferences - as well as mundane experiences of e
 veryday life in Tel Aviv-Jaffa\, I present a picture of life in the limina
 l spaces of the victim - perpetrator - witness matrix in Israel/Palestine.
  Activists’ relations to transnational political discourses and networks
  are analysed both as a kind of subversion of the global - their situation
  within spaces of conflict leading to complex positions vis-a-vis the prom
 ise of a global political morality - and as a challenge to current manifes
 tations of the Zionist project and the Jewish state.\n
LOCATION:Senior Common Room\, 17 Mill Lane\, Cambridge CB2 1RX
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