Viral Occupation: Israeli Military Rule and the Smartphone Camera
Monday 13 June 2016, 15:00 – 17:00 University Theatre (room 1.01A, Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16-18), Amsterdam
Lecture by Rebecca Stein, Duke University
Israel’s occupation has been transformed in the age of digital technologies. Today, all of the political players in the theater of occupation rely on digital camera technologies and viral image circuits for political claims making. Within the Jewish Israeli population, the increased reliance on digital photographic technologies, and the spread of photographic aptitudes, has grown alongside the right-wing radicalization. This paper considers the interrelationship between these political and technological processes, to consider the import of new visualization technologies, photographic practices, and image-circuits, on the terms of Israeli rule in in the Palestinian territories.
Dr. Rebecca Stein’s research studies linkages between cultural and political processes in Israel in relation to its military occupation and the history of Palestinian dispossession. She is the author of (with Adi Kuntsman) Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age (Stanford University Press, 2015), which studies the interplay between new media and military occupation in the Israel/Palestine context. She continues to work on the way new communication technologies are meditating the everyday Israeli relationship to its military occupation — including the ways such technologies are changing practices and logics of military ‘counterinsurgency’, altering the everyday terms of soldiering, changing the Israeli civilian relationship to Palestinians under occupation, and remaking the terrain of human rights work and anti-occupation activism within Israel.
This seminar is organized by gate48-critical Israeli’s in the Netherlands and SECURCIT project (ERC) at the UvA
Admission is FREE