Collective Study in Times of Emergency — L’Internationale (EN)
As part of Collective Study in Times of Emergency, a series of publications and public programs by L’Internationale Online, a reading and a listening session are presented.
Researcher Layal Ftouni will analyse the contradictions at the heart of human rights discourse, followed by excerpts from the series Until Liberation shared by the collective Learning Palestine.
West Bank, 2024. Photo: Nick Aikens
Researcher Layal Ftouni will explore the question and very formulation of Human Rights in the context of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Highlighting what she identifies as the hypocrisy embedded in so-called universal Human Rights as promoted by Western states, she will interrogate what a commitment to “Never Again” means today, what the struggle for rights — or even the right to have rights — entails under ongoing colonial violence.
The second part of the evening will feature members of the Learning Palestine collective, who will introduce and play excerpts from Until Liberation, their ongoing twelve-hour audio compilations blending music, conversations, chants, lectures, and archival recordings connected to the Palestinian liberation struggle.
Layal Ftouni is an assistant professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory whose work spans critical theory, gender studies, Palestine studies, political theory, and critiques of the human and Human Rights. Her current project, Ecologies of Violence: Affirmations of Life at the Frontiers of Survival, examines the reproduction of life — human and environmental — under conditions of death and debilitation in the settler-colonial context of Palestine.
Learning Palestine is a collective of artists, academics, intellectuals, and community members dedicated to disseminating knowledge on the ongoing Palestinian struggle through methods independent of corporate platforms and social media constraints.