Presentation and discussion featuring Hagar Kotef (SOAS, The University of London), with response by Audra Simpson (Columbia University). 

This talk examines the politics of “home” and the production of political belonging (both national and individual) amidst conditions of structural violence. Focusing on Israel/Palestine, Kotef seeks to understand how people develop attachments to spaces and places when these attachments themselves facilitate state violence. She will point to a work of memory through which violence becomes not invisible but rather banal, rendered an uncontested part of one’s political identity.

Hagar Kotef is Associate Professor of Political Theory and Comparative Political Thought in the Department of Politics and International Relations, SOAS, The University of London, and the author of Movement and the Ordering of Freedom (2015).

Audra Simpson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is the author of Mohawk Interruptus (Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States) (2014).