Mada al-Carmel Center held the second meeting of its workshop “Palestinians in Israel: Transformations of knowledge production, readings in academic and historical texts, and theoretical approaches”on October 7 & 8, 2022 in Ramallah. The workshop was under the direction of Dr. Mohannad Mustafa and Dr. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, and counted on the participation of fifteen master’s and doctoral students, the second meeting was entitled: “The production of academic knowledge from non-academic knowledge: The state of memoirs and the literary field among Palestinians in Israel”.

The first session of the meeting was entitled “The theoretical framework of the second meeting”, during which two interventions were presented. The first was by the Director General of Mada al-Carmel, Dr. Mohanad Mustafa, entitled “Reflections on the relationship between literature and knowledge“. The second was by Dr. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the Research Committee at Mada al-Carmel, entitled “Literature, translations and memoirs as archives“. The session concluded with a screening of Emile Habibi’s film I Stayed in Haifa.

This was followed by the second session of the meeting, entitled “Political and sociological approaches to memoirs”in which three of the workshop participants presented excerpts from personal memoirs:

-Saher Ghazzawi – A researcher and academic, Ghazzawi holds a master’s degree in Political Sciences from the University of Haifa and presented the memoir “Illuminations on the Birth of the Islamic Movement Banned by Israel” by Sheikh Raed Salah.

-Omar Agbariya – A researcher and social activist interested in Palestinian Studies, Agbariya holds a master’s degree from Tel-aviv University and presented the memoir “Al-Rawabi Panthers” by Ahmed Saleh Al-Jarbouni.

-Rula Shahwan – Director of the Center for Politics and Conflict Resolution at the American University-Ramallah and PhD student in The Audiovisual and Cinema Studies at Goethe University – Frankfurt, Shahwan presented the memoir “It Was Morning and it Was Evening: My Hopes for Memories” by Najwa Kawar-Farah.

The second meeting concluded with the third session, which was entitled “Knowledge Production and the Literary Field”. Here, two of the workshop’s participants presented excerpts from the literary field:

-Raefa Jabareen – A researcher in the field of health awareness and lecturer at the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Haifa, Jabareen presented the novel “The Pessoptimist” by Emile Habibi.

-Halima Abu Haneya – Haneya holds a PhD in Social Sciences from Birzeit University, and presented the novel “With Ease” by Tawfiq Muammar.