Please be invited to this special book launch for Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) with author, Dr. Ashjan Ajour. Theoretically and ethnographically informed, the book bears an intimate witness to a very specific form of political resistance, the practice of hunger striking, by Palestinian prisoners.

Join us for an illuminating discussion of the book with author, Dr. Ashjan Ajour and discussants, Dr. Teo Todorova (University of Warwick), Dr. Guy Aitchison (Loughborough University) and Dr. Michael Rees (Wolverhampton University).

A Zoom Link will be provided to registrants on the day of the event.

Author:

Dr. Ashjan Ajour completed her PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London in August 2019, her research interests and teaching experience are situated in sociology; gender studies and feminist theories and movements; political subjectivity; incarceration; decolonization and global indigenous politics. She taught in the United Kingdom and Palestine at Goldsmiths, Warwick University and Birzeit University. In 2019 she engaged as a Teaching Fellow in Sociology at Warwick University convening modules in Gender Studies. She also worked as a Research Fellow in the School of Media, Communications and Sociology at the University of Leicester working on ‘Decolonising the Curriculum’ research project. She is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Wolverhampton, and the 2022 incoming Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Brown University in the United States. Her last publications are an article by Cultural Politics (Duke University Press): The Spiritualization of Politics and the Technologies of Resistant Body: Conceptualizing Hunger Striking Subjectivity, and a book by Palgrave Macmillan: Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes: Revolutionary Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body

Discussants:

Dr. Guy Aitchison is a Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at Loughborough University. He is a political theorist with interests in human rights, migration and the ethics of political resistance. He is currently PI for the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust project, ‘Starving for Dignity: Re-framing the Ethics of Hunger Strikes’ and recently published an article on the ethics of hunger strikes in the Journal of Political Philosophy.

Dr. Teodora Todorova is an independent researcher and a teaching fellow based in The Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Her research is concerned with grassroots activism and transnational civil society responses to gendered and racialised power and state violence. She has worked on gendered violence and post-conflict reconciliation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and on solidarity and decolonial activism in Palestine-Israel. Dr Todorova is the chair of the subcommittee on Pedagogy and Outreach of the British Society of Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES).

In her recent monograph, Decolonial Solidarity in Palestine-Israel: Settler Colonialism and Resistance From Within, Dr Todorova extends the framework of settler colonial studies beyond scholarly analysis and into the realm of activist practice by evaluating how decolonial solidarity has shaped, and been influenced by, the writings of both Palestinian and Israeli theorists. The book shows that new forms of civil society activism, bringing together Palestinian and Israeli activists, can rejuvenate the resistance to occupation and the Israeli state's growing authoritarianism.

Dr. Michael Rees is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Wolverhampton. He has recently published the monograph, Tattooing in Contemporary Society: Identity and Authenticity (Routledge, 2021). He has published work examining tattooing and identity, and around patients living with kidney disease. He is concerned with investigating the lived experience of humans and their interaction with the social world they inhabit.