| 4 Nov 2008 | 3:30pm - 5:00pm | CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane, Seminar & Meeting Room | |
- Description
Description
15.30 – 16.30 – CRASSH Seminar room (presentation)
16.30 – 17.00 – CRASSH Meeting room (discussion)
Speaker: Noam Leshem, PhD Candidate at the London Consortium, University of London, and a Wingate Foundation Political Science Scholar; also a Teaching Fellow at Birkbeck College School of Humanities.
Respondent: Dr Wendy Pullan, Senior Lecturer in the History and Philosophy of Architecture at the University of Cambridge; Principal Investigator for 'Conflict in Cities and the Contested State’.
Discussant: Maximillian Gwiazda, Associate academic of Pembroke College and a founding member and former president of ‘Architecture Sans Frontières – Cambridge’.
This session’s presentation will illustrate the notion of “contained conflict” through the spatial and visual practices that are used to render the crisis within the Arab parts of the city invisible. The presentation will illustrate how images are blocked from view that might, as reminders of previous experiences of terror, potentially disrupt the daily routine of the Jewish population of the city, and how a resulting “regime of visibility” is established. It will be suggested that this cleansing of the visual field is an inherent feature of a broader political structure that dictates the management of crisis in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The session will also analyse particular examples that illustrate an orchestrated attempt to isolate Jewish residents from the daily reality of Arabs living in close proximity. However, attention will be also given to unique ways through which communities and individuals, Arabs and Jews, resist this imposed blindness and reinstate their presence on the surface of city.
• What does Jerusalem’s political visual regime block from view, from whom and for what purpose?
• How can a discussion of this visual regime reveal the political logic that governs the city at present?
• What are the limitations of this political practice, i.e., how is it contested and how do images of violence and terror reappear into sight?
• How did the separation wall in East Jerusalem gain such iconic status in the international perception of Jerusalem as “a city in conflict” and does this status reveal or obscure the political and spatial complexities of Jerusalem?
• The “contained conflict” in Jerusalem is inherently dialectic: it is often unclear who is initiating and who is the subject of this containment. How does this process see across broad ethno-national division lines and reappear in other – ethnic, socioeconomic, cultural – points of friction?
