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biopolitics, Closure for Our Journey with “The Right to Maim” // evaluation // next semester // semester closing event

Unfortunately I must cancel our final seminar session on 5.2.2024 due to a required scholalry staff meeting at the university. To make up for the missed discussion time, I invite you to participate in the following reflective activity:

Spend 30-60 minutes writing an internal dialogue between yourself at the beginning of this course and yourself now at the end. What key insights, questions, or critiques would you highlight from your intellectual journey with Puar’s text? How have your perspectives shifted or been complicated?

Then, post 1-2 questions or reflections from this dialogue on the course blog by [date]. These can be areas you still find confusing, moments that felt revealing or unsettling, ideas you want to explore further, or ways Puar’s concepts have informed how you look at the world.

Though we cannot meet in person, this will help synthesize our collective learning over the term. I will respond briefly to each post during the individual follow-up meetings on 12.2.2024. Please contact me if you have any questions.

I want to acknowledge that this has been an unusual semester with many disruptions and schedule changes due to circumstances beyond our control. From transit strikes to staff actions, we navigated various challenges together. While this impacted the flow of our discussions at times, I am grateful for your patience, empathy, and continued engagement with the course material and each other in the midst of uncertainty. I believe we found meaning in Puar’s text despite a sometimes “fuzzy” journey.

Please take a few minutes to provide your feedback on this course via https://lehrevaluation.fu-berlin.de/productive/en/sl/mUhkCt5e4502 . Your perspectives will help me improve courses in this module (Reading the Middle East) for future students.

I’m also excited to announce a new course for next semester – “Peering Through the Artificial Looking Glass: AI and the Middle East”:

Take a journey through the AI looking glass to examine how intelligent technologies are reshaping the Middle East. This seminar provides a critical perspective on AI, moving beyond the hype to probe its emerging influence across the region’s economies, societies, politics, and cultures.

Blending theory with regional insights, we will interpret AI’s impacts on issues from climate change and labor markets to surveillance and geopolitics. The course catalyzes debate on AI’s promises and perils, equipping students to assess its transformative potential with wisdom and nuance.

Lectures situate empirical studies within conceptual frameworks like Crawford’s “Atlas of AI.” Multidisciplinary readings and discussions consider how AI could either entrench or transform power structures. Student projects analyze AI case studies, from Emirati space programs to Saudi data initiatives.

This seminar charts AI’s expansion across a complex region. It eschews simplistic techno-utopian narratives, favoring nuanced and evidence-based perspectives. Join us as we peer critically yet optimistically through the artificial looking glass at the Middle East’s unfolding AI future.

I hope to see some of you there!

Thank you again for your thoughtful participation during an eventful semester – I have learned a great deal from you all. I wish you the very best going forward.

Best wishes, Victoria.

PS: Don’t forget that the semester closing event of the Department of History and Cultural Studies will take place on Wednesday, Feb 14, as of 6 PM in the lecture hall -1.2009 in the Holzlaube; the Iranian Studies institute has organized food and beverages.

biopolitics, compensatory task for January 8

Unfortunately I will not be able to hold our discussion session today on biopolitics in Palestine as planned, due to being out indisposed. I apologize for the late notice and inconvenience.

Instead, please spend this time reading the assigned text below and completing the following task:

Carefully read through the excerpt provided and make notes on the key terms, concepts, and frameworks that the author refers to or utilizes. Consider what the author intends to convey through their use of each of these elements. How do these ideas and lenses shape the author’s analysis? Also re-read and think about how Jasbir Puar is utilizing terms such as biopolitics. 

Feel free to post your thoughts and interpretations of the reading in our course blog. This will allow us to begin a written dialogue even in my absence. We can pick up an in-depth discussion when we meet again on January 15th at 11am to discuss this task and chapter 4. Please note that this is a change from our original plan; I will update the course blog accordingly.

I hope this alternative assignment provides a productive way for you to engage with the materials for today. Please let me know if you have any other questions. I look forward to being back in class next week.

Wishing you all the best.


Necropolitical Ends: Biopower and Debility Across the Palestinian Closures Regime

Israel wields the full array of biopolitical stratagems in managing the boundaries of Palestinian civic life. The archipelago of strategic barriers, checkpoints, and permit regimes constitute what Foucault terms an enclosing ‘biopower’ – one calibrating movement of populations to carve the occupied landscape into discontiguous Palestinian zones. Life within these enclaves incubates contagious risks and debilities from cramped quarters lacking medical infrastructure or clean water. Israel’s periodic blockading of nutrition, sanitation equipment, and medicinal goods cannot but weaponize the biological vitality of Gazans contained inside a besieged strip. The microbes of infants wasting without milk come to manifest both the productivity and expendability of certain ‘Othered’ bare lives.

Psychologically, the internalization of occupation emerges clearly in UN interviews documenting cases of ‘checkpoint syndrome’. Mundane passages through militarized chokepoints instill trauma and anxiety in Palestinian citizens that biometric monitoring reduces to quantifiable behavioral data, further rationalizing these encounters through a biopolitical logic. According to prevailing neoliberal thought, such internalized responsibilization marks out modern governance. Yet indefinite delays also incubate cabals of young men, baking in their abjection until properly ‘feral’ – suggesting that disorder can likewise scaffold certain agendas. Fragmented roads and lands produce social isolation and communal violence that panoptic IDF overlooks exploit, particularly during flareups used to justify further territorial incursion.

Ultimately then, this regime’s biopolitical gambit for protected majoritarian life requires the calculated debilitation of minority existence across fractal borders. Clinical language of ‘maintaining necessary pressure’ reduces millions to statistics tweaked towards optimized outcomes behind securitized perimeter walls. Between dystopian literature tropes of citizenship and exception, the gradients of distorted life stretch from gestating bodies to burning effigies – each productive of their locality in the differential biopolitical field.

writing seminar, task to confirm the topic for the final paper

Writing time begins!

Write to me an email from your @fu-berlin.de email address with your intended topic (a working title and short description will suffice) and I will then confirm the deadline. This step is administratively necessary. I will only accept papers which have been confirmed during this week, at best by Tuesday, 28.11.2023, 6 PM.

writing seminar, task for session #6: peer review session

Revise your introduction to subtly challenge assumptions and create generative instability for readers by Thursday 16.11.2023 6 PM.

Post your 1 or 2 paragraph(s) in the blog.

Have your revision “ready” by November 20, as we will have an intensive review session.

Feel free to discuss the matters of problem crafting, instabilities, costs and benefits, gaps in the blog.

We can all benefit from reviewing each other’s topics, paragraphs, feedback.

writing seminar, commentary on session #4: constructing the problem

Academic discourse often touts “objectivity” yet reproduces stale narratives that bolster status quos and power. But when dealing with topics like the Middle East, we must move beyond “generic truisms” that reinforce simplistic binaries and static notions about the region, and shake up entrenched assumptions that flatten complex realities into simplistic binaries: West/East, colonizer/colonized, modern/traditional.

Rather than filling “gaps”, we could ask “what if?” questions that jolt static mindsets. What if we viewed women’s rights through diverse local lenses rather than monolithic religious ones? How might our conceptions of “civil society” change if we trace the term’s contextual origins?

We can present contradictory evidence that adds nuance to notions of fixed identity. While Islam is incredibly diverse, it is often portrayed as a singular culture. And seemingly “static” villages contain internal debates on social change.

Dominant narratives rarely emerge from those marginalized. We need situated perspectives: platforming Middle Eastern women’s scholarship to counter Western paternalism. And applying a power analysis to knowledge production itself—how funding and institutions perpetuate status quos.

This work of unsettling stable truths swims against academic conventions. But carving out unstable spaces where new modes of thought take root is vital for grappling with multifaceted realities. Although unsettling, the cracks where light seeps in reveal possibilities for connection across difference.

writing seminar, task for session #5: challenging assumptions

Draft 1–2 paragraphs presenting the central problem your paper will address, using language of instability, costs, and benefits by Thursday 9.11.2023 6 PM.

Do not submit this draft; the deadline is intended to keep you on track. It will help to have the draft ready for session #5 on November 16.

Feel free to discuss the matters of problem crafting, instabilities, costs and benefits, gaps in the blog.

We can all benefit from reviewing each other’s topics, paragraphs, feedback.