5-9 p.m. ET Friday, October 18, 2024
Palestine on Paper
Free with RSVP
Register for in-person event
Join Visualizing Palestine as they launch their debut book via a panel and one-day exhibit, coupled with the late Rajie Cook’s exhibition, Waiting for Peace, at AANM. Featured panelists include Jessica Anderson, Huwaida Arraf, and Murad Idris with facilitator Jeffrey Ghannam.
- 5 p.m. Doors open
- 5-6 p.m. Reception + Exhibition viewing
- 6-7:30 p.m. Panel discussion
- 7:30-8:15 Book sale
- 8:15-9 p.m. Exhibition viewing
About the Panelists
Elizabeth Barrett Sullivan is the Curator of Collections at AANM. She has curated more than 50 exhibitions at AANM and manages the thousands of objects, photographs and archives in the permanent collection. She received her master’s in museum studies from the University of Sydney and was selected as one of 10 participants in the Smithsonian’s Visiting Professionals Program in 2019.
Huwaida Arraf is a Palestinian-American civil/human rights attorney and social justice activist. For over two decades, she has been involved in legal, political, and grassroots initiatives for Palestinian liberation, including co-founding the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and leading the Free Gaza Movement, which organized sea voyages to Gaza to confront and challenge Israel’s illegal blockade on the two million Palestinians living there. She was one of the primary organizers of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and was traveling with it when it was lethally attacked by Israeli forces in May 2010. In 2011, she was one of the six Palestinian Freedom Riders, who, inspired by the U.S. Civil Rights Movement’s Freedom Rides of the 1960s, attempted to ride segregated Israeli settler public transport, for which they were harassed, beaten and arrested. Huwaida is currently based in her hometown of Detroit, where she is raising her two young children and practicing civil rights law, advocating for Michiganders abused by the system, including victims of the Flint water crisis, police brutality, wrongful arrests, voter disenfranchisement and more. In 2022, Huwaida was a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives for Michigan’s 10th Congressional District. She continues to speak, educate and organize for Palestinian freedom and human rights, and our collective liberation.
Jessica Anderson is a human rights researcher based in Michigan. Since 2013, she has been working with Visualizing Palestine, an organization that uses data and research to visually communicate Palestinian experiences to provoke narrative change. Alongside Aline Batarseh and Yosra El-Gazzar, Jessica is a co-editor of the new book Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation, published by Haymarket Books.
Murad Idris is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He is the author of the award-winning book, War for Peace: Genealogies of a Violent Ideal in Western and Islamic Thought (Oxford University Press, 2019), which looks at how philosophers fantasize about “peace” in order to promote hierarchy, war, and repression. Professor Idris’s current projects include a book about how the rhetoric of “dialogue against hate” has long enabled anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Muslim racism, and antisemitism. He has held fellowships or positions at Cornell University, Columbia University, Harvard University, the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory in Bologna, the University of Virginia, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania with specializations in Political Theory and Middle East Politics.
About the Moderator
Jeff Ghannam is an attorney, author and media scholar with many years of experience in global freedom of expression and First Amendment protections. A former journalist, he spent a decade at the Detroit Free Press as part of a long career that includes early research on the rise and impact of digital media and the Arab uprisings, published by the National Endowment for Democracy. He received a Knight Foundation Press Fellowship to the Middle East and North Africa region. He also served as a technical advisor in media development initiatives in Bangladesh, Egypt, Lebanon and Qatar, among others. He has taught on the nexus of law and media as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C. His law practice is based in Northville, Michigan.
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