Dartmouth Events

This event is part of "Gaza is Burning," a critical solidarities series @Dartmouth WGSS.

Please register at http://dartgo.org/Witnesses.

Jenny Kelly will discuss what solidarity means—and must mean—in the context of witnessing a livestreamed genocide. She will briefly detail the history of virtual tourism in Gaza as a form of resistance to the ongoing siege of the Strip. She will reflect on the labor of Palestinian guides in organizing these tours, as well as how they creatively resist the severing of Gaza from the world, and from the rest of Palestine, by teaching life amidst cycles of genocidal bombardment. She will also invite us to reflect on the limitations and possibilities of solidarity, virtual and otherwise, and what it might look like when Palestinians can extend invitations to tourists to visit a free Palestine.

Jenny Kelly is an Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her first book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine (Duke University Press, 2023), is a multi-sited interdisciplinary study of solidarity tourism in Palestine that shows how solidarity tourism has emerged in Palestine as an organizing strategy that is both embedded in and working against histories of sustained displacement. Her next project, co-edited with Somdeep Sen and Lila Sharif, is Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine, in the Detours Series at Duke University Press. She is also a Founding Collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and UCSC’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine.