The Detours Symposium Series Featuring Detours-Palestine

Speaker: Susan Greene, An interdisciplinary artist and clinical psychologist. Her work focuses on the psychologies of space, intersections of trauma, creativity, memory, resilience, and resistance. Sites of her 50+ public art installations span US cities, Palestine’s West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza, and refugee camps in Lebanon. Greene is the founding director of Art Forces, an art/activist organization based in the Bay Area. Greene holds an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts from San Francisco State University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from The Wright Institute, Berkeley. She is a Palestinian American Research Center and Fulbright fellow.

Speaker: Najib Joe Hakim, A Working documentary photographer, artist and photography instructor. Hakim also serves as the President of the Board for the Network of Photographers for Palestine and is a founding member of Class Conscious Photographers. He is the recipient of the Rebuilding Alliance Storytellers Award for a trilogy of projects on Palestine, a Political Art Fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and a past nominee for the US Artist Fellowship.

Speaker: Jenny Kelly, An Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research broadly engages questions of settler colonialism, U.S. empire, and the fraught politics of both tourism and solidarity, with her first book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine (Duke University Press, 2023), a multi-sited interdisciplinary study of solidarity tourism in Palestine. She is also a Founding Collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and UCSC’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine.

Speaker: Gabi Kirk, (she/her) is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Analysis at Cal Poly Humboldt in Goudi’ni (Arcata, California). She is working on a book on the past, present, and future of food sovereignty in Palestine. She is an active member of the organizing committee for Geographers for Justice in Palestine.

Speaker: Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb, A professor of media studies at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) and a senior data justice fellow with Princeton’s Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. She is the recipient of the 2024 Women Support Organization’s Distinguished Woman of the Year award and the 2024 Activism and Social Justice Scholarly Influence Award by the National Communication Association’s (NCA’s) Activism and Social Justice Division. She co-produced and co-directed the documentary 1948: Creation & Catastrophe, winner of the Jerusalem International Film Festival’s 2019 Special Jury Award in the Feature Documentary category. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Gaza xReal project: The Phoenix of Gaza. She is working currently on a study of Palestinian digital resistance and decolonizing digital spaces.

Speaker: Somdeep Sen, Associate Professor at Roskilde University in Denmark and Research Associate at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. He’s the author of Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial (Cornell, 2020). His writings have also appeared in Foreign Policy, The Washington Post and Al Jazeera English.

Speaker: Lila Sharif, (she/hers) is a Palestinian American feminist scholar, creative, writer, and organizer. She is a co-founding member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective and a co-founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective. Her forthcoming book Olive Skins (UMN Press) examines the material and cultural significance of the olive tree, which Palestinians have harvested for over 6000 years, to explore Indigenous Palestinian themes of belonging, return, resistance, and feminism.