Rami Rmeileh | University of Exeter (original) (raw)

I am currently working on Sumud (steadfastness); an indigenous Palestinian practice of survival against the hardship of occupation and displacement. My current work explores sumud as an analytic concept, tracing its appeal amongst Palestinians in Lebanon's refugee camps, and interrogating its work within particular social formations and interlocking systems of oppression. Sumud as an analytic offers a vantage point into historically specific articulations that may offer an alternative understanding of politics of struggle. Exploring Palestinian subjectivity under conditions of extreme subjugations offers a counter-alternative to the hegemonic models produced in the discipline of psychology that are entangled with coloniality and completely disengaged from critical analyses of settler colonialism.

My work draws on silenced narratives, overlooked cultural productions, and archives, with a strong reliance on Latin American decolonial scholarship, liberation psychology, feminist theory, and decolonial Palestinian scholarship. I attempt to highlight Palestinian knowledge production at the intersection of cultural studies and social liberation psychology. My work relies on a methodological approach that is acutely sensitive to the complex spatial and temporal dynamics within the Palestinian refugee camps. This approach has enabled me to deepen my understanding of the various roles, power dynamics, and discourses employed by both me and my interlocutors, which often shift according to different locations within the camp, whether intentionally or not. By incorporating diverse mediums such as a walking ethnography, formal and informal interviews and encounters (coffee-talks), institutional/grassroots archival research, observations, movies and novels, I have sought to avoid simplistic binaries of resistance/resilience, victims/heroes, romanticization/victimization or total generalizations that might emerge from specific spaces or power dynamics within the camp—truths that may not hold when considered across the entire camp. This methodological attentiveness reveals the complexity of sumud and life under extreme subjugation, which I explore across the front of the camp(s), behind the façade when walking beyond the institutions located at the front (NGOs, political factions offices, hospital, clinics, cultural clubs…), in the camp alleyways as metaphors of cultural productions, and within homes.

My academic interests include; Sumud, indigenous psychology, critical consciousness, decolonial praxis, cognitive injustice.
Supervisors: Katie Natanel, Ilan Pappe, and Laleh Khalili

less