This talk explores Palestinian life in Berlin as a lens through which to rethink urban belonging beyond citizenship and formal recognition. Drawing on auto-ethnography, family history, and ethnographic observation, it examines how Palestinians make home, sustain kinship, and assert presence in a city where many live under conditions of bureaucratic ambiguity, racialized surveillance, and political exclusion. Palestinian everyday practices emerge as constitutive of Berlin’s social and spatial life. At its core is the tension between what official archives record and what everyday life preserves. German bureaucratic categories such as ungeklärte Staatsangehörigkeit (“unclear nationality”) exemplify this tension, producing forms of epistemic violence that suspend Palestinians in conditions of precarity and partial legibility, limiting how they can appear, move, and be recognized. At the same time, Palestinian presence takes shape through material and relational infrastructures of everyday life: shops, goods, domestic interiors, streets, and informal networks of exchange. Spaces such as Sonnenallee, often referred to as Berlin’s “Arab Street,” emerge as sites where memory, care, and sociality are sustained and circulated. Engaging concepts such as “homing desire” and the tension between archive and repertoire, the talk argues that these material and relational infrastructures constitute a form of urban practice that sustains Palestinian life while reworking how the city is inhabited, remembered, and made meaningful.
Himmat Zoubi (Zu’bi) is an urban sociologist and feminist activist. She is an Associate Researcher at Mada al-Carmel – The Arab Center for Applied Social Research, Haifa. She received her PhD in Sociology from Ben-Gurion University and holds two MA 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. Alongside her current project, "Re-urbanizing Palestine: "Cultural Spaces" and Palestinian Urbanity", she 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.
Himmat was a EUME Fellow during the academic years 2018-21. In 2021/22, she was a Fellow of the International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC), funded by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, associated with The Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and EUME. In the academic years 2022-26, she remains affiliated with EUME and is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies.
Hanan Toukan is Associate Professor of Middle East Studies at Bard College Berlin. She is the author of The Politics of Art: Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy in Palestine, Lebanon and Jordan (Stanford University Press), 2021) and currently serves on the editorial board of Jerusalem Quarterly, as a member of the Board of Directors of the Palestinian Museum in Ramallah, and as editor of the newly established Palestine Studies Series at Anthem Press.
Pleaser register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.