CMES Seminar: "Shattered Landscapes: An Agonistic Approach to Ethnography in Palestine and Israel"

Speaker Bio

Anne Lene Stein is a doctoral student at the Department of Political Science, Lund University. Her PhD project is researching embodied approaches to challenging dominant systems of knowledge in everyday life in Palestine and Israel. Her focus is on the interaction between agonistic and antagonistic dimensions within epistemic struggles and embodied forms of protest. Specifically, Anne Lene Stein examines how Palestinian artists within Israel and the West Bank as well as Israeli anti-Zionist/anti-apartheid activists use embodied performances to disrupt hegemonic knowledge systems and resist various forms of violence and injustice. Her research also touches on future-oriented or utopian reimaginations of Palestine as expressed through these performances. She conceptualises the agonistic-antagonistic interplay as a performative, epistemically disruptive politics—an embodied language of dissent that opens up political spaces for the emergence of new subjectivities.