Virtual seminar with Dr.des Saad Amira and filmmaker Andrea Luka Zimmerman on Animals in Palestine

This free virtual seminar will take place on Wednesday 13 November 2024, from 3–4:30 PM Irish Standard Time. This seminar is part of a series that runs in the academic year 2024-2025, organised by the Animal Studies Research Network UCD, as part of its Environmental Humanities strand.

Saad Amira will join us to explore the development of the wild boar infestation in the highlands of Palestine from a politico-ecological lens. This presentation will examine indigenous ways of noticing the infestation and making sense of it. Moreover, it will explore the ways in which the infestation is being politicized by Palestinian villagers and the interconnectedness of theseviews with the prevalent settler colonial structure of ethnic cleansing and depeasantization. This work builds on more than six years of ethnographic work in the Salfit region and the stretch of Palestinian frontier villages in the West Bank.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman will join to talk about the way she features animals in her work in different contexts, often with communities who are unseen, deliberately overlooked and marginalised. Zimmerman will talk about the way in which she features a range of animals: from the street dogs of Istanbul to companion animals and mythologized creatures in Palestine: seeking to present them in their own terms - resisting a simplifying anthropomorphic gaze - while acknowledging how they inform the human, making meaning out of their hybrid position and bearing witness to the best and worst of what we are.

About the speakers:

Saad Amira leads the Urban Studies and Spatial Practices program at Al Quds Bard in Palestine. Saad has successfully defended his PhD thesis at the University of Basel, where he worked as a lecturer, and is currently revising his thesis for Publication. Saad was a visiting researcher in the African Center for Cities at the University of Cape Town. His research sits at the nexus between settler colonialism, political ecology and environmental violence in Palestine and the Arab region. Saad is also interested in youth-led social movements in the Middle East. In his PhD project, Saad has looked into the politico-ecological dynamics of the wild boar pandemic in Salfit, Palestine. Through ethnography and oral history of Palestinian villagers, Saad examined the ways it intertwines with Israeli settler colonialism and the iterations of development of the Palestinian Authority.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a Jarman Award-winning artist and filmmaker whose multi-layered practice explores fragile refusals and counter memories, itinerant lives, human and otherwise, in relation to structural and political injustice. Andrea's films include: Taskafa, Stories of the Street (2013, written and voiced by the late John Berger), Estate, a Reverie (2015), Erase and Forget (2017), Artangel produced Here for Life (2019) and The Wapping Project produced Wayfaring Stranger (2024, featuring Eileen Myles), which have screened widely around the world including at Berlinale, Locarno, IDFA, Istanbul, BAFICI and IFFR festivals, as well as in cinemas, galleries, and community and activist spaces. Andrea co-founded the cultural collectives Fugitive Images and Vision Machine (collaborators on Academy Award® nominated feature documentary 'The Look of Silence') and is Professor of Possible Film (0.5) at Central Saint Martins, London.

The Animal Studies Research Network at UCD is organised by Deborah Schrijvers and Poulomi Choudhury.

Thanks to @Nour Tayeh via Unsplash