CMJS lunch lecture - Josephine Lehaff: Studying Palestine: Contested identity in a complicated situation

Researcher positionality is crucial when engaging with a contested domain such as recent and historical events in Palestine and Israel, narratives around which are deeply politicized. However, acknowledgement of positionality is made difficult where aspects of identity have been subject to obfuscation or erasure—an experience common among members of the Palestinian diaspora—and where identity itself is a site of contestation. In the past year of study, my own sense of identity and belonging have been unsettled: as a citizen of the Global North, a fragment of the Palestinian diaspora, an affective and affected being, and as a scholar. In this lunch lecture, I explore contestations of Palestinian identity and my own positionality in researching conflict coverage of Palestine and Israel.