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SoSe 24: Off-University: Conflict, Knowledge, and Memory: Cases from Palestine and Syria

Mohamad Mostafa Alabsi; Ammar Kandeel

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This course proposes an inquiry into the academic and cultural experiences of writing and re-writing history in Palestine and in Syria. It combines different approaches and intellectual schools going from the epistemic question of the “decolonizing” of knowledge to today’s impact of information revolution as a fact of cultural production and political representations. The course emphasizes on a cross-disciplinary discussions related to the nature of both conflicts and their respective features. The contribution to the national-self building is explored through the lens of the statelessness in the Palestinian case and the one-party State then the civil war in the Syrian case. It brings in an original combination of dissent/subaltern literature and the questioning of the philosophical concept of Civil Society and the legal and political definition of the State. It tracks evolutions and mechanisms of knowledge production in contexts of “exile”, of “estrangement” and of “conflictual narratives”, as it explores alternative forms of expression and representations with visual arts, popular culture and the thriving of personal and oral history accounts. The sessions will be presented and discussed by both instructors with an attention to the students’ participation and the col-built and interactive progress of the course. The sessions include watching and discussing of visual materials: visual arts, reviews of films and literature, documentary material as well as an experimental and class interaction experiences with OpenAI -ChatGPT. close