Community Building and Cultural Memory: The Role of Art as Resistance in the Case of a Liberated Palestine

IA invites you to a virtual Teaching and Learning Circle (TLC) that explores artists who have centered Palestinian liberation in their artistic practices. Participants will hear from Aisha Mershani as a representative of La La Lil Jidar, and are invited to create and share scholarly and/or artistic practices that are in the spirit of archiving and advancing current or past social movements. This TLC will afford us the opportunity to come together in the spirit of dialogue and community building, to learn how cultural histories of resistance persist despite all odds, and to share how we can effectively speak, mentor, teach, heal, agitate, and create new bridges of understanding through uplifting cultural work. This TLC will offer strategies for how cultural, academic, and activist leaders can employ methods of cultural resistance for freedom of oppressed peoples, and more specifically, a free Palestine.

About the Speaker:
Aisha Mershani (they/them) was born in Las Vegas, Nevada to an American Jewish mother and a Moroccan Muslim father. Mershani holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Anthropology from the University of Redlands in California, and a Master’s and a Ph.D. degree from the UNESCO program in Peace, Development Studies, and Conflict Transformation at the Universitat Jaume I in Castelló de la Plana, Spain. From 2003-2022 Mershani focused their subject on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. They have photographed military checkpoints, popular demonstrations, house demolitions, destroyed villages, and the daily lives of Palestinians living under the violence of the Israeli occupation. Mershani’s photographs have been in multiple publications, as well as many internet news sites over the years to further the awareness of the ongoing situation on the ground in Palestine. They are also one of the artists in the reference book, “Encyclopedia of Arab American Artists”.  Mershani is currently an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Gettysburg College and combines their scholarly work with their media activism.  

About this Event Series:
This event is part of a year-long programming series co-organized by members of the Imagining America National Advisory Board. Through virtual events, creative art-making, and in-person convenings, IA Values in Action: Weaving Solidarities through Creative Culture brings together the vast IA community for interactive learning and reflection on the current conditions and contradictions in which we are struggling — in our institutions, in our communities, in our families — and explores how to empower ourselves to work creatively and joyfully while building solidarities.