Amahl Bishara
Biographic Data
| ID | 87849 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Amahl Bishara |
| GIVEN NAMES | Amahl |
| FAMILY NAME | Bishara |
| SIGNATURE | BISHARA A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tufts University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9598-6540 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 162 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
On Palestinians’ insistence that Palestinian journalism matters
Israeli violence against Palestinian journalists and journalistic institutions has made this the deadliest war for journalists in the 20th and 21st centuries. During the genocide in Gaza, Israel has killed, imprisoned and starved journalists. This multifaceted violence carries with it layers of significance. It terrifies journalists left alive and suggests that Palestinians can be forced into silence. In the face of this outright and semantic vio…
Speaking Across Generations and Geographies of the Ongoing Nakba at Seventy-six
Comprehending the ferocious scale of Israel's genocidal war on Gaza means reckoning with Palestinians' history and ongoing experience of Nakba, or "catastrophic dispossession." The events of 2023-2024 elicited narratives of 1947-1948 that demonstrate how the start of the Nakba made possible forms of violence that have continued for decades and have now intensified dramatically: Palestinians injured and killed in their homes, dispossession, dehydr…
Exploring the imperative of “relational documentary”: Process, power, and unruly collaboration in media production on Palestine
Becoming an anthropologist of Palestine during the War on Terror meant that the specter of violence and exclusion always loomed over my research; yet I had become an anthropologist out of a commitment to presence in and engagement with people from the Middle East. I investigate the ways in which Faye Ginsburg's approach to studying polarizing issues, her analysis of Indigenous media, and her commitment to ethical collaboration has shaped my writt…
Mediating Palestine: Representation, Mobilization, and Experimentation
Roundtable: On Gaza and the War on Palestinian Journalism
Shared anthropology of the Middle East: Essays on media in honor of Faye Ginsburg
The articles in this special issue are the outcome of the panel: “Papers in Honor of Faye Ginsburg: Visual and Media Anthropology in the Middle East,” which was held virtually for the American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings of November 2021. The reach of Ginsburg's work as well as her mentorship through the creation of NYU's Graduate Program in Culture & Media has shaped the ethnography of media and visual anthropology across a diver…
Responding to Displacement: Bringing Together Palestinians across the Green Line and Beyond
In this interview, Amahl Bishara speaks with Nidal Al-Azza, director of Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, based in Bethlehem, and Rula Nasr-Mazzawi, a psychologist and founding member of Addar for Culture and Art, based in Nazareth, about their organizations’ collaborative initiatives. Al-Azza and Nasr-Mazzawi address displacement as an experience shared by most of the Palestinian people, including refugees and i…
Publics, Polls, Protest: Public Representation as Sociopolitical Practice
This article seeks to illuminate connections across studies of publics, media, formal political processes, and protests. An examination of representation as sociopolitical practice allows us to consider the practices that occur around the edges of what has been considered the public sphere and to interrogate the work of its boundaries, which reify national publics, separate civil society from formal political work, and separate representational w…
Decolonizing Middle East anthropology: Toward liberations in SWANA societies
In the anthropology of Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), there is an effort underway to decolonize the field. This process is taking shape in academic writing, in academic institutions, in field practices, and among broader publics. It must arise from priorities in the region; it also builds on wider scholarship on race, indigeneity, and militarism. It requires an expansion of the bounds of politics, consideration of who can participate, a…
Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression
Palestinians living on different sides of the Green Line make up approximately one-fifth of Israeli citizens and about four-fifths of the population of the West Bank. In both groups, activists assert that they share a single political struggle for national liberation. Yet, obstacles inhibit their ability to speak to each other and as a collective. Geopolitical boundaries fragment Palestinians into ever smaller groups. Crossing a Line enters these…
The multifaceted outcomes of community-engaged water quality management in a Palestinian refugee camp
The Palestinian residents of Aida Refugee Camp have lived under Israeli military occupation for over 50 years. While they struggle against the more legible concerns of the separation wall, unemployment, military violence, and high rates of incarceration, these residents are also acutely aware of a lack of adequate drinking water supplies. This led one young filmmaker, working at a small Palestinian non-governmental organization (NGO) in Aida, to …
Occupation by other means
Making Violence Visible at the US/Mexico Border: Review of the Exhibitions Fencing In Democracy and State of Exception/Estado de Excepción , and the Film El mar la mar
Sovereignty and Popular Sovereignty for Palestinians and Beyond
Mobilizing Resistance: Israel's Racist Walls of Separation
Fifteen years ago, in the spring of 2002, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon announced the building of a barrier in the West Bank. According to the official Israeli statements, it was for security
Palestinian acts of speaking together, apart: Subalterneities and the politics of fracture
Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank both protested in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza during the 2014 war. They did so with what Charles Tilly would regard as distinct repertoires of contention, though they both referenced the same heritage of resistance. I argue that we should interrogate the boundaries that states establish to see how different forms of sovereignty and state violence shape resistance and expres…
Driving while Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank: The politics of disorientation and the routes of a subaltern knowledge
Israel's system of closure divides Palestinian citizens of Israel from Palestinians of the West Bank. For members of both categories, road journeys spur political analysis, explicitly stated or implicitly packed into jokes or offhand comments. If, in liberal traditions, political knowledge is idealized as disembodied, abstract, and dispassionate, Palestinian knowledge gained while driving is none of these things. Yet it can provide important insi…
From Dust to Concrete: Infrastructural Change, Political Intractability, and the Colonial Road Movie
Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics
Few topics in the news are more hotly contested than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict-and news coverage itself is always a subject of debate. But rarely do these debates incorporate an on-the-ground perspective of what and who newsmaking entails. Studying how journalists work in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Nablus, and on the tense roads that connect these cities, Amahl Bishara demonstrates how the production of U.S. news about Palestinian…
New Media and Political Change in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: Assembling Media Worlds and Cultivating Networks of Care
In terms of infrastructure and technology, the media environment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories developed extensively between the first and second Intifadas. Yet the media environment of the second Intifada was not necessarily more conducive to democratic change than that of the first. This paper argues that technological advances must be evaluated in their political contexts, and that the Palestinian context offers insight into what…
Palestinian Christian Networked Activism: Reifying “Nonviolence” or Divining Justice
For two years now, a new kind of Christmas service has taken place in the Bethlehem Chapel of the Washington National Cathedral. Located steps away from the celestial stained glass windows and great organ of the cathedral’s main nave, the Bethlehem Chapel’s vaulted ceiling and rows of stone columns have an intimate feel as the room fills with people and winter coats. The chapel has a material bond with its namesake, as its limestone foundation wa…
Watching U.S. Television From the Palestinian Street: The Media, the State, and Representational Interventions
This article tracks contests of representation among the Palestinian Authority (PA), the U.S. news media, and the Palestinian public regarding the funeral of PA President Yasser Arafat and subsequent presidential elections. It is popularly assumed that governments primarily represent by gathering people and implementing actions in their names, whereas media represent by depicting the world. Latour has called for “object-oriented democracies” that…
Anthropologists Must Enter the News About the Middle East and Expand Its Limits
Middle East Section
Middle East Section
Driving while Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank: The politics of disorientation and the routes of a subaltern knowledge
Israel's system of closure divides Palestinian citizens of Israel from Palestinians of the West Bank. For members of both categories, road journeys spur political analysis, explicitly stated or implicitly packed into jokes or offhand comments. If, in liberal traditions, political knowledge is idealized as disembodied, abstract, and dispassionate, Palestinian knowledge gained while driving is none of these things. Yet it can provide important insi…
Sovereignty and Popular Sovereignty for Palestinians and Beyond
Watching U.S. Television From the Palestinian Street: The Media, the State, and Representational Interventions
This article tracks contests of representation among the Palestinian Authority (PA), the U.S. news media, and the Palestinian public regarding the funeral of PA President Yasser Arafat and subsequent presidential elections. It is popularly assumed that governments primarily represent by gathering people and implementing actions in their names, whereas media represent by depicting the world. Latour has called for “object-oriented democracies” that…
Local hands, international news: Palestinian journalists and the international media
Study of the production process of news about Palestinians rather than simply its final forms reveals the extent to which mainstream news is a cultural product not only of US society and western journalism's professional norms, but of Palestinian society as well. Palestinian journalists working for international news contribute essential labor to the final product of international news. They serve as cultural and geographical guides for foreign c…
The multifaceted outcomes of community-engaged water quality management in a Palestinian refugee camp
The Palestinian residents of Aida Refugee Camp have lived under Israeli military occupation for over 50 years. While they struggle against the more legible concerns of the separation wall, unemployment, military violence, and high rates of incarceration, these residents are also acutely aware of a lack of adequate drinking water supplies. This led one young filmmaker, working at a small Palestinian non-governmental organization (NGO) in Aida, to …
Decolonizing Middle East anthropology: Toward liberations in SWANA societies
In the anthropology of Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), there is an effort underway to decolonize the field. This process is taking shape in academic writing, in academic institutions, in field practices, and among broader publics. It must arise from priorities in the region; it also builds on wider scholarship on race, indigeneity, and militarism. It requires an expansion of the bounds of politics, consideration of who can participate, a…
Palestinian acts of speaking together, apart: Subalterneities and the politics of fracture
Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank both protested in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza during the 2014 war. They did so with what Charles Tilly would regard as distinct repertoires of contention, though they both referenced the same heritage of resistance. I argue that we should interrogate the boundaries that states establish to see how different forms of sovereignty and state violence shape resistance and expres…
Mobilizing Resistance: Israel's Racist Walls of Separation
Fifteen years ago, in the spring of 2002, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon announced the building of a barrier in the West Bank. According to the official Israeli statements, it was for security
Mediating Palestine: Representation, Mobilization, and Experimentation
Making Violence Visible at the US/Mexico Border: Review of the Exhibitions Fencing In Democracy and State of Exception/Estado de Excepción , and the Film El mar la mar
House and Homeland
Research Article| June 01 2003 House and Homeland: EXAMINING SENTIMENTS ABOUT AND CLAIMS TO JERUSALEM AND ITS HOUSES Amahl Bishara Amahl Bishara Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2003) 21 (2 (75)): 141–162. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-21-2_75-141 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Amahl Bishara; House and Homeland: EXAMINING SENTIMENTS ABOUT AND CLAIMS TO JERUSALEM A…
Roundtable: On Gaza and the War on Palestinian Journalism
Publics, Polls, Protest: Public Representation as Sociopolitical Practice
This article seeks to illuminate connections across studies of publics, media, formal political processes, and protests. An examination of representation as sociopolitical practice allows us to consider the practices that occur around the edges of what has been considered the public sphere and to interrogate the work of its boundaries, which reify national publics, separate civil society from formal political work, and separate representational w…
From Dust to Concrete: Infrastructural Change, Political Intractability, and the Colonial Road Movie
New Media and Political Change in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: Assembling Media Worlds and Cultivating Networks of Care
In terms of infrastructure and technology, the media environment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories developed extensively between the first and second Intifadas. Yet the media environment of the second Intifada was not necessarily more conducive to democratic change than that of the first. This paper argues that technological advances must be evaluated in their political contexts, and that the Palestinian context offers insight into what…
House and Homeland
Research Article| June 01 2003 House and Homeland: EXAMINING SENTIMENTS ABOUT AND CLAIMS TO JERUSALEM AND ITS HOUSES Amahl Bishara Amahl Bishara Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2003) 21 (2 (75)): 141–162. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-21-2_75-141 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Amahl Bishara; House and Homeland: EXAMINING SENTIMENTS ABOUT AND CLAIMS TO JERUSALEM A…
Uncomfortable Subjects
The Targeted and the Untargeted of Nablus
Middle East Section
Middle East Section
Local hands, international news: Palestinian journalists and the international media
Study of the production process of news about Palestinians rather than simply its final forms reveals the extent to which mainstream news is a cultural product not only of US society and western journalism's professional norms, but of Palestinian society as well. Palestinian journalists working for international news contribute essential labor to the final product of international news. They serve as cultural and geographical guides for foreign c…
Anthropologists Must Enter the News About the Middle East and Expand Its Limits
Watching U.S. Television From the Palestinian Street: The Media, the State, and Representational Interventions
This article tracks contests of representation among the Palestinian Authority (PA), the U.S. news media, and the Palestinian public regarding the funeral of PA President Yasser Arafat and subsequent presidential elections. It is popularly assumed that governments primarily represent by gathering people and implementing actions in their names, whereas media represent by depicting the world. Latour has called for “object-oriented democracies” that…
Palestinian Christian Networked Activism: Reifying “Nonviolence” or Divining Justice
For two years now, a new kind of Christmas service has taken place in the Bethlehem Chapel of the Washington National Cathedral. Located steps away from the celestial stained glass windows and great organ of the cathedral’s main nave, the Bethlehem Chapel’s vaulted ceiling and rows of stone columns have an intimate feel as the room fills with people and winter coats. The chapel has a material bond with its namesake, as its limestone foundation wa…
New Media and Political Change in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: Assembling Media Worlds and Cultivating Networks of Care
In terms of infrastructure and technology, the media environment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories developed extensively between the first and second Intifadas. Yet the media environment of the second Intifada was not necessarily more conducive to democratic change than that of the first. This paper argues that technological advances must be evaluated in their political contexts, and that the Palestinian context offers insight into what…
Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics
Few topics in the news are more hotly contested than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict-and news coverage itself is always a subject of debate. But rarely do these debates incorporate an on-the-ground perspective of what and who newsmaking entails. Studying how journalists work in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Nablus, and on the tense roads that connect these cities, Amahl Bishara demonstrates how the production of U.S. news about Palestinian…
Driving while Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank: The politics of disorientation and the routes of a subaltern knowledge
Israel's system of closure divides Palestinian citizens of Israel from Palestinians of the West Bank. For members of both categories, road journeys spur political analysis, explicitly stated or implicitly packed into jokes or offhand comments. If, in liberal traditions, political knowledge is idealized as disembodied, abstract, and dispassionate, Palestinian knowledge gained while driving is none of these things. Yet it can provide important insi…
From Dust to Concrete: Infrastructural Change, Political Intractability, and the Colonial Road Movie
Palestinian acts of speaking together, apart: Subalterneities and the politics of fracture
Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank both protested in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza during the 2014 war. They did so with what Charles Tilly would regard as distinct repertoires of contention, though they both referenced the same heritage of resistance. I argue that we should interrogate the boundaries that states establish to see how different forms of sovereignty and state violence shape resistance and expres…
Making Violence Visible at the US/Mexico Border: Review of the Exhibitions Fencing In Democracy and State of Exception/Estado de Excepción , and the Film El mar la mar
Sovereignty and Popular Sovereignty for Palestinians and Beyond
Mobilizing Resistance: Israel's Racist Walls of Separation
Fifteen years ago, in the spring of 2002, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon announced the building of a barrier in the West Bank. According to the official Israeli statements, it was for security
The multifaceted outcomes of community-engaged water quality management in a Palestinian refugee camp
The Palestinian residents of Aida Refugee Camp have lived under Israeli military occupation for over 50 years. While they struggle against the more legible concerns of the separation wall, unemployment, military violence, and high rates of incarceration, these residents are also acutely aware of a lack of adequate drinking water supplies. This led one young filmmaker, working at a small Palestinian non-governmental organization (NGO) in Aida, to …
Occupation by other means
Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression
Palestinians living on different sides of the Green Line make up approximately one-fifth of Israeli citizens and about four-fifths of the population of the West Bank. In both groups, activists assert that they share a single political struggle for national liberation. Yet, obstacles inhibit their ability to speak to each other and as a collective. Geopolitical boundaries fragment Palestinians into ever smaller groups. Crossing a Line enters these…
Responding to Displacement: Bringing Together Palestinians across the Green Line and Beyond
In this interview, Amahl Bishara speaks with Nidal Al-Azza, director of Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, based in Bethlehem, and Rula Nasr-Mazzawi, a psychologist and founding member of Addar for Culture and Art, based in Nazareth, about their organizations’ collaborative initiatives. Al-Azza and Nasr-Mazzawi address displacement as an experience shared by most of the Palestinian people, including refugees and i…
Publics, Polls, Protest: Public Representation as Sociopolitical Practice
This article seeks to illuminate connections across studies of publics, media, formal political processes, and protests. An examination of representation as sociopolitical practice allows us to consider the practices that occur around the edges of what has been considered the public sphere and to interrogate the work of its boundaries, which reify national publics, separate civil society from formal political work, and separate representational w…
Decolonizing Middle East anthropology: Toward liberations in SWANA societies
In the anthropology of Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), there is an effort underway to decolonize the field. This process is taking shape in academic writing, in academic institutions, in field practices, and among broader publics. It must arise from priorities in the region; it also builds on wider scholarship on race, indigeneity, and militarism. It requires an expansion of the bounds of politics, consideration of who can participate, a…
Exploring the imperative of “relational documentary”: Process, power, and unruly collaboration in media production on Palestine
Becoming an anthropologist of Palestine during the War on Terror meant that the specter of violence and exclusion always loomed over my research; yet I had become an anthropologist out of a commitment to presence in and engagement with people from the Middle East. I investigate the ways in which Faye Ginsburg's approach to studying polarizing issues, her analysis of Indigenous media, and her commitment to ethical collaboration has shaped my writt…
Mediating Palestine: Representation, Mobilization, and Experimentation
Political science (20 works) · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (17 works) · History (16 works) · Middle East Politics and Society (14 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Media studies (11 works) · Politics (11 works)