Chloe Chbat
Thesis title
Bordering and immobility: a study of the bordering of Palestinian bodies in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) through settler colonialism.
Research
This research aims to unsettle the notion of settler colonialism by understanding it as a technique to border Palestinian bodies, and to reimagine the Palestinian subject in contemporary settler colonialism studies. It attempts to operationalize the concept of “bodies as borders” and “border elasticity” in a settler colonial setting specific to Israeli / Palestinian relations. The debates that have set the foundations of this field of inquiry and have shaped this research include settler colonialism, bordering, and mobility.
This research attempts to fill the void that has been left in bordering and area studies research of Israel and Palestine by theorising the border's multiple technical deployments as mechanisms that sustain and reproduce settler colonialism in Israel/Palestine. This project will look at episodes of categorization within Palestinian communities and evaluate how these categories reflect different degrees of spatialities of power. These episodes include the experience of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, Bedouins in the Naqab (Negev), Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinian laborers in the West Bank, and Palestinians in the diaspora who are met with the effects of Israeli settler colonial tactics even while residing outside the territorially bounded sovereign polity of Israel and the OPT.