Irene Calis Director, Arab World Studies CAS | CRGC | Critical Race Gender and Culture Studies
- Degrees
- PhD in social anthropology, London School of Economics & Political Science (2012)
- Languages Spoken
- Arabic, French
- Bio
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Irene Calis is a decolonial scholar, educator, and organizer. Her research focuses on emancipatory politics from the perspective of those living their struggle. Through a comparative frame of analysis across space and time, her work is anchored in political pathways for decolonial futures. Her scholarship, grounded in the Palestinian liberation struggle, involves long-term ethnographic fieldwork living and working with Palestinian farming and youth communities throughout the West Bank, as well as with popular struggles in South Africa, Oceania, and Indigenous North America.
Her current work on emancipatory futures situates the Palestinian liberation struggle in a wider conversation with the global South, bringing together perspectives from South Africa, Indigenous North America, and Palestine to explore how anti-colonial struggles imagine, collectivize their visions, and work to build their preferred futures. This comparative dialogue brings into view parallels between the colony and any potential post-colonial future.
Calis' longer-term work among Palestinian farmers examines what it means for families to live in systemic 鈥渙n-going crisis鈥 and what this entails for ideas about ordinary life. Specifically, it elucidates how the very nature of 鈥渢he everyday鈥 is affected as crisis, loss, and denial are made routine through the everyday practices of a settler colonial state.
In taking a wider, historical view of one community over time, this research distills the strategic interplay between both spectacular and routinized forms of violence as a key method of governance in colonial oppression. This considers the role of seemingly mundane state practices, such as bureaucracy, in both the formation and subordination of racialized others. Furthermore, in unpacking what survival entails for subordinated groups, it challenges notions of 鈥榬esilience鈥 and the optimistic view of human agency in studies on resistance, and alerts us to the systemic denigration of both one鈥檚 ability and instinct to live.
As an educator, Calis' courses are grounded in a decolonial, intersectional knowledge-base that de-centers the persistent white, Euro-American canon in academia, encouraging students to find new ways to think and act in their world. An internationalist teaching perspective supports this aim. In addition to the US, she has held positions at the University formally known as Rhodes in South Africa, the University of Hawai`i in Oceania, and the University of Cambridge in England and regularly speaks with groups across these spaces. She writes for academic and wider public forums on issues that address the workings of power in society and how those on the underside of history are actively contesting and shaping the terms of their existence.
- See Also
- Palestine: Land, Life, Dignity-2022-23 Speaker Series
- Thinking Freedom from the global South- Spring 2021 Speaker Series
- For the Media
- To request an interview for a news story, call 麻豆视频 Communications at 202-885-5950 or submit a request.
Teaching
Summer 2024
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AWST-115 Introduction to the Arab World
Fall 2024
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AWST-440 Palestine: Land, Life, Dignity
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CORE-105 Complex Problems Seminar: Being Indigenous
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CORE-105 Complex Problems Seminar: Being Indigenous
Spring 2025
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WGSS-225 Gender, Politics & Power
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WGSS-225 Gender, Politics & Power
Partnerships & Affiliations
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AntiRacist Research and Policy Center
Faculty Affiliate -
Policy Member -
Research Advisory Council
Scholarly, Creative & Professional Activities
Research Interests
emancipatory futures;聽indigeneity;聽culture & power; violence, precarity, and the everyday; the politics of resistance;聽decolonial feminisms;聽theory from聽the global South;聽philosophy of race;聽critical pedagogy;聽Palestine;聽the Arab World;聽Oceania.
Selected Publications
- Calis, Irene (2017).聽 鈥淩outine & Rupture: The Everyday Workings of Abyssal (Dis)Order in the Palestinian Foodbasket.鈥澛 American Ethnologist, Vol 44 (1): 65-76.
- Benessaiah, Nejm & Calis, Irene (2016). 鈥淎frican Trysts: Reimagining the Saharan Divide鈥 in (eds.) Bosewell and Nyamnjoh鈥檚 Postcolonial African Anthropologies. Pretoria: HSRC Press.
- Calis, Irene (2015)聽聽聽聽聽 鈥淏eyond the Apartheid Analogy: Time to reframe Our Palestinian Struggle鈥, published by Al Shabaka January 13th
- Calis, Irene (2013)聽聽聽聽聽聽鈥淎id & Occupation: Maintaining the Status quo in Palestine.鈥澛Journal for Palestine Studies, Vol 42 (3): 10-28. Spring聽