Invited to Witness draws from participant observation of solidarity tours across Palestine and interviews with guides, organizers, community members, and tourists to explore what happens when tourism understands itself as solidarity and solidarity functions through modalities of tourism. Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as a fraught localized political strategy and an emergent industry, through which Palestinian organizers refashion conventional tourism by extending deliberately truncated invitations to visit Palestine and witness the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. The book shows how Palestinian organizers, under the constraints of military occupation, and in a context in which they do not control their borders or the historical narrative, wrest both the capacity to invite and, in Edward Saids words, “the permission to narrate” from Israeli control.

Featured Speakers:

• Jennifer Kelly, Professor in FMST and CRES

• Nick Mitchell, Professor in FMST and CRES

• Sophia Azeb, Professor in CRES

This Event is Sponsored By:

UCSC Critical Race and Ethnic Studies | UCSC Feminist Studies | The Center for Racial Justice