Please join us on November 12, 2024 from 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM for an online book talk hosted by Jennifer Lynn Kelly, who will be discussing her book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine.

Register here: https://tinyurl.com/invitedtowitness

In Invited to Witness, Jennifer Lynn Kelly explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism across Occupied Palestine. Examining the relationships among race, colonialism, and movement-building in spaces where tourism and military occupation operate in tandem, Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as both political strategy and emergent industry. She draws from fieldwork on solidarity tours in Palestine/Israel and interviews with guides, organizers, community members, and tourists, asking what happens when tourism is marketed as activism and when anticolonial work functions through tourism. Palestinian organizers, she demonstrates, have refashioned the conventions of tourism by extending invitations to tourists to witness Palestinian resistance and the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. In so doing, Kelly shows how Palestinian guides and organizers wrest from Israeli control the capacity to invite and the permission to narrate both their oppression and their liberation.

Jennifer Lynn Kelly is an Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies with a Portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies from University of Texas at Austin, her master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities from New York University, and her bachelor’s degree in Feminist Studies and Literature from University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research broadly engages questions of settler colonialism, U.S. empire, and the fraught politics of both tourism and solidarity. Her first book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine (Duke University Press, 2023), a multi-sited interdisciplinary study of solidarity tourism in Palestine that draws from archival research on past and present delegations to Palestine and ethnographic research she completed as a 2012-2013 and 2019-2020 Palestinian American Research Center Fellow. In her project, she analyzes the ways in which solidarity tourism has emerged in Palestine as an organizing strategy that is both embedded in and working against histories of sustained displacement.

The event is co-sponsored by departments and units on campus including:

Center for the Study of Women, Streisand Center
Consortium for Palestine Studies
Department of Gender Studies