Amahl Bishara

Amahl Bishara is currently revising her dissertation into a book tentatively entitled Local Hands, International News:  Producing U.S. News from the Palestinian Street.  Local Hands examines the production of U.S. news in the West Bank by way of thorough ethnography.  It demonstrates, first, that U.S. news is the product of cross-cultural, hierarchical collaborations, and, second, that U.S. news-making is also an important site of local cultural and political production for Palestinians.  This research thus analyzes how these norms and practices of journalistic production are related to processes of political representation in the West Bank.  The project's goals are to (1) interrogate conventional ideas about knowledge production and political representation that privilege liberal, rational discourse while overlooking non-discursive and affective journalistic and political practices and (2) examine how transnational media flows affect local political structures.  Amahl's other research and teaching interests include mobility in the West Bank, democracy, human rights, expressive culture, knowledge production, and the anthropology of media.

Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
Tufts University