EUME
2024/ 2025

Himmat Zoubi

Re-urbanizing Palestine: “Cultural Spaces” and Palestinian Urbanity

Previous Fellowships: 2023/ 2024, 2022/ 2023, 2021/ 2022, 2020/ 2021, 2019/ 2020, 2018/ 2019

Himmat Zoubi (Zu’bi) is an urban sociologist and feminist activist. She is the Research Director at Mada Al-Carmel - Arab Center for Applied Social Research, Haifa. She received her PhD in Sociology from Ben-Gurion University and holds two Master's degrees, one in Criminology and another in Gender Studies. Her work focuses on cities in colonial context and she published several book chapters and articles on gender, cities and settler colonialism, memory and oral history, indigenous knowledge and resistance. She has received several awards and grants for her research, among them the Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) fellowship, and the Scholarship for Outstanding Postdoctoral Arab Fellows from the Council for Higher Education (2020-2021). Alongside her current project, Re-urbanizing Palestine: “Cultural Spaces” and Palestinian Urbanity, Zoubi is working on her book project “De-Urbanizing Palestine: Transforming Hayfa with Haifa (1948-1953)” about replacing Hayfa (the term Hayfa is used to distinguish between pre-1948 Hayfa and post-occupation Haifa) with Haifa during a transition period between the colonial British Mandate and the Israeli State. It analyzes the making of the Israeli “mixed cities” in the state building era, and the consequent changes to the city’s urban and social sphere. The book explores the everyday resistance of the remaining urban Palestinians the mutabaqqun (المتبقون) to scrutinize the changes that took place in Hayfa at large. Zoubi was a EUME Fellow during the academic years 2018-21. In 2021/22 she was a postdoctoral fellow of the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC) at Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, associated with The Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and EUME. In the academic years 2022-25, she remains an associated EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.

2019-2024

Re-urbanizing Palestine: “Cultural Spaces” and Palestinian Urbanity

Seventy years after Israel’s sweeping attempts to de-urbanize Palestinian social life, Palestinians have forged alternative cultural and intellectual initiatives to revive their disrupted urbanity. The year 2019 witnessed some of these cultural and intellectual initiatives materializing in the streets of Haifa, with a massive mobilization of Palestinian feminists and LGBTQ activists. By taking to the streets, Palestinian grassroots activists along with feminist and queer civil society organizations, were speaking out against patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist oppression.This project scrutinizes the relationships between neoliberalism, globalization, settler colonial local urban policies and new strategies of resistance in the realm of culture and urban activism. It explores transformations in spatial social power relations in Haifa since the 1990’s, a period often described as one of new beginnings in Arab thought, social, and artistic practices. 
This project examines the interaction between macro and micro politics, the continuous struggle over urban space, and the way Palestinians live and re-claim their city today. It investigates strategies and civic practices to challenge existing political and spatial power relations, as well as internal social constrains to re-gain urban spaces, and to practice (an imagined) a de-colonized and inclusive urban space inside Israel.

2018/ 2019

Culture Spaces and “The Right to the City”: Palestinians in Israel as a Case Study

Seventy years after Israel’s sweeping attempts to de-urbanize Palestinian social life, Palestinians in Israel have forged alternative cultural and intellectual initiatives to practice their “right to the city” in Israel. This project builds on my doctoral research which examined the production of Israel colonial urban space through the destruction of urban Palestinian space in Israel between 1948 and 1953. Building on how power relations shape space, people, and social interaction, this project broadens this scope by exploring transformations in spatial social power relations in Haifa. It examines the interaction between macro and micro politics, the continuous struggle between colonial power and the colonized over urban space, and the way Palestinians, living their city today, challenge spatial and social power relations to reproduce urban space. This project builds on a growing body of knowledge on the interplay between culture, as everyday practice, and cultural city policy making as a global urban phenomenon. It contributes to two bodies of literature: on settler colonial cities and on cultural resistance. The project critically examines the relationships between neoliberalism, globalization, local urban policies and cultural resistance, using “Palestinian cultural pockets” in “mixed cities” in Israel as a case study.
 


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