Hey, Debbie Gordon, I appreciate your comments from the perspective of a US academic trying to work with another national academy and set of politics. Does this itself necessitate a post-disciplinary perspective on the US side, if not on the Palestinian side? Or is that inadequate to a transnational mapping?
You've got my attention here bringing up underlying assumptions about constant revision. Your comment that in the Palestinian political constant revisions are not a choice is probably more true than not over more time periods and places than the idea that multiple revisions and particular kinds of polishing are possible, necessary or even desirable. I'm not sure how to bring your insight together with the ideologies of clarity and accessibility that some revision practices assume and attempt to fulfill.
When you comment on the aging of America, are you referring to some kind of consolidation of power in the hands of baby boomers? Does such power in the academy inflect generational politics within and among various disciplines, interdisciplines, and other knowledge formations? I think of the generational meanings that shift over the last 5 years that attract around the term Queer, for example.
Are transnational feminist scholar-activist knowledges of Palestinian struggle and academies generational in the US along the same lines of not delivering the goods you comment on in the Palestinian academic context?
How do the contexts of resistance operate to make some epistemological issues, say allegiances to disciplines, background or foreground differentially?
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how about "galling" flexibility. i don't know if i would use the term post-disciplinary for the palestinian academy; it's apples and oranges. it's post disciplinary in the sense that activism and the academy are certainly are not really distinct in the way they are in the u.s. the universities are sites of national identity production--again, i don't think this is about choice but about the palestinian perception that israel is a settler-colonial enterprise. there is a kind of terror for the palestinians of no borders, and nationalism is self-defense but also identity production under galling circumstances, like going through checkpoints. there is a checkpoint regime in place that makes moving even ten kilometers in some cases a harrowing experience, sometimes easy, sometimes involving a lot of sitting around and waiting for israeli soldiers to "open" it, which means being subjected to surveillance, which takes time, etc. etc. etc. i'm thinking of student experiences but also those of faculty in private cars who have to wait in line. some of how people have adopted is by living in two places, one close to work, the other their original home.
okay, that's it for now. as you can see i find myself wanting to describe more than conceptualize, because i've been doing more of that in my writing as i try to "be" an ethnographer, which i guess i am.
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