Archiving, Refusal and Mujaawarah: Fellows Intensive
BAK 2019/2020 Fellow Reem Shilleh brings 2018/2019 Fellow Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh to speak with the Fellows on their shared experiences archiving. As Shilleh writes:
Based on our respective experiences with collecting, archiving — on Palestine and in Burj al-Shamali camp in Lebanon — and refusing to doing both, our conversations around editing led us to questions of pedagogy and (un)learning and the difficulty of escaping or countering the political and economic system we live in and which treats knowledge and people as commodities. Following our initial conversations, we (the vast collective we) were submerged in the overwhelming reality of a pandemic, and subsequently the sense of shared/practiced refusal found a new meaning.
To explore the potentialities of refusal in this context, we would like to introduce mujaawarah (neighbouring), a medium practiced by the Palestinian pedagogue and mathematician Munir Fasheh. Fasheh explains mujawarrah as “a medium of learning and understanding, as a way to regain rootedness”. Rootedness not being backwardness or underdevelopment but being rooted in place, culture, and community, in knowledge ultimately. How can juxtaposing the question of rootedness to the constraints of restricted mobility be made productive?
