“Who are the missing and how can we find them? I don’t fear who or what I will find in the process, but that we will stop looking for them.”

As part of the Fall 2021 Intra-Disciplinary Seminar series, Mezna Qato's talk will focus on her practice of convening, conspiring, campaigning with conviviality, a calling out for whispered memories, fragmented stories, and missing accounts. Finding those left over from cataclysms is a commitment of method and practice, politics and performance, an ethic, and a burning compulsion.

Registration in required.

Mezna Qato is Margaret Anstee Fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. She is a historian of Palestine and Palestinians, and is writing a book on the pedagogical worlds of Palestinians after the Nakba. She co-leads the Archives of the Disappeared Research Programme at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at Cambridge, and is a Trustee of the Qattan Foundation. Her collaborative work with ‘A Future Collective’ was in the 16th Venice Architecture Biennial’s Bahrain Pavilion (2018) and Performance Space in New York (2018).

The IDS public lecture series is part of the Robert Lehman Visiting Artist Program at The Cooper Union. We are grateful for major funding from the Robert Lehman Foundation. The IDS public lecture series is also made possible by generous support from the Open Society Foundations.