Moad Musbahi (G3) interviews Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Global South Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology

An Armenian Palestinian feminist scholar and ethnographer, Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, is Anthropology’s Global South Visiting Scholar for 2024-25. She works at the intersection of human rights, ethnography of children, necropolitics, embodiment, and settler-colonialism. Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the author of numerous interdisciplinary publications, including the books Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding and The Cunnibng of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism. 

Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian currently holds an appointment at the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London and she was a Professor at the Institute of Criminology of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her appointment is supported by the University Center for Human Values (UCHV) and the Princeton School for Public and International Affairs (SPIA). ). In Fall 2024, Dr. Shalhoub-Kevorkian taught the seminar “Topics in Theory and Practice of Anthropology: Monstrosity & Colonialism” and in Spring 2025 she will teach the seminar “Advanced Topics in Anthropology: Colonial Urbicide & Hyperprecarity: The Case of Jerusalem.”

Moad Musbahi (MM): Your background is in a variety of disciplines, and now you're here in the anthropology department at Princeton. Can you share briefly what you think anthropology does for you and your scholarship, what references, methods and engagement does it afford you? What are the ways in which the work that you do in all the different fields has a particular kind of approach and a particular kind of space in anthropology, both in terms of what you take from anthropology, but also how you intervene within it?

Nadera Shahloub-Kevorkian (NSK): My work has always bridged multiple disciplinary approaches, including Law and Society and psycho-political and criminological analysis. However, anthropology has been central to my intellectual and scholarly endeavors. This stems not only from my active involvement in the Insaniyyat Anthropological Association in Palestine, led by Rema Hammami and Khaled Fourani, but also from years of collaboration with prominent anthropologists such as Lila Abu-Lughod, Ghassan Hage and more. Anthropology has profoundly shaped my projects, including my book on Unchilding, our edited volume The Cunning of Gender Violence and my ongoing research on the sacralization of politics, securitization, security theologies, and the intersections and interrelationality of body (the flesh) and home/homeland. My work is deeply ethnographic, and anthropology has always been an integral part of my intellectual framework. 

When I received the invitation to be a visiting scholar at Princeton, I was particularly eager to engage with the exceptional scholars in the anthropology department, many of whom work in areas that resonate with my own, such as settler colonialism in the work of Julia Elyachar and Kēhaulani Kauanui, or the body/flesh in Serguei Oushakine’s research, as well as those focusing on Latin America. Being able to engage with, share ideas, and learn from the faculty here, including their insightful public talks and activities, was immensely rewarding. 

What made the experience truly extraordinary, however, was teaching the course Monstrosity and Colonialism this past fall semester. I was thrilled to see the course included in the graduate syllabus and to work with 13 brilliant PhD students from anthropology and other fields such as population studies and demography, international relations, and Slavic studies. Their enthusiasm and deep engagement with the material made teaching this course personally and professionally enriching. The support I received from the faculty and administration further enhanced this experience. 

I’ve never been in a university where communication was so seamless—receiving timely responses from colleagues like Serguei, engaging in meaningful exchanges with Julia, and experiencing such a supportive environment. This was one of the most positive and fulfilling experiences I’ve had in the American academy. The interdisciplinary conversations on anthropology, law, space, body, and affect theory reflected the themes of my past and ongoing work and created an atmosphere of genuine warmth and collaboration. Feeling that kind of support and care is essential for me to thrive, and I am deeply grateful to everyone involved for making this such an incredible experience. Thank you.

MM: Can you tell us some of the thoughts about the course you will teach in the Spring? What is its title, what are the kind of key themes that you're looking to address? And what does it mean to teach these topics at this moment, with a genocide ongoing in Gaza and across Jerusalem, the West Bank and Palestine?

NSK: Well, if the first course was about monstrosity, with the focus on the flesh, on the body and on embodiment- a course that was shaped and impacted by the genocide, the next course will go to the more spatial analyses, to land politics. And this is why the title is Colonial Urbicide & Hyperprecarity, and I'm really honing in on Jerusalem as a case study. I want to speak about how urbicide happens, and on the space and place of the city and its destruction. We can see today in Gaza that destruction, of its cultural heritage and of its built spaces is genocidal. I want to help the students see and connect what happened, for example, in Yugoslavia and in the Yugoslav War, to the genocide today in Gaza, and how the city is part of this genocidal machinery of destruction. And this course will draw on the concept of urbicide to consider the case of Jerusalem and bring to the forefront the settler colonial project there, about how sacralization and securitization really effects the remaking of the space, the imagination of building, the rewriting of the past, present and future, and of course, connecting it to what we have learned from Patrick Wolfe, that to destroy is to replace. Of course, I'm starting with Fanon and with Fanonian analysis in his work on Concerning Violence, to then question who else has written about urbicide, the different infrastructures of colonization and decolonization.  We'll move from the work of geographers to political thinkers. In geography, for example, I love the work of Stephen Graham where he shows how warfare in the city is connected to states of emergency. We will use anthropologists such as Munira Khayyat on war in the South of Lebanon, and her analysis on the landscape of force and the ecologies of resistance. We'll look at colonization and space, at the killing of the city. In Jerusalem, I’ll be talking about the killing of space and the city and the dislocation and unending dismemberment of Palestinians via spatial  & legal policies and politics. 

Over the course, we will engage with the politics of zoning and planning, the connection between geopolitics and state planning bureaucracies in relation to the master plan in Jerusalem; on housing and home demolitions; on the work of the community that talks about the right to space and or the lack of right to space; on the occupation of the senses; about state’s framing of non-places of living for the other. We will delve into studies on surveillance, checkpoints and urbicide; to name a few of the themes for each week. Towards the end, I will engage students with ‘cyber urbicide’, and introduce a concept I developed that speaks about swarming the city, invoking the Arabic concept of ‘Ihala’, which offers a new level of analysis to understanding urbicide. To this end, the class will be connected to new changes taking place today in Jerusalem. Of course, there is a lot in the course and I'm excited about it. 

MM: Thank you, that's really helpful overview of the course, and look forward to it! I want to pick up on the point you made at the end and in listening to your talk on Ihala that you gave at the department back in October and how to think about this what happening right now. In your talk, you described the reality of being surrounded by the totality of an occupation, of space and of your very senses, necessitates a different perspective for study, of the encounter with others and the city, an altered perspective of your own individuation vis a vis the occupation, as it alters the very possibility of experience. 

Can you tell us what teaching at this moment means for you, more than say teaching before this past year, when categories and subjects of study are being reshaped in real time through such unprecedent violence? What does it mean to do anthropology as the relevance of its methods and techniques are being questioned? 

NSK: My work is deeply connected to exploring the intimate and expanding on the tender ties that often remain invisible, unacknowledged, and unseen. Teaching this year provided an opportunity to guide students toward a critical study of these tender spaces—spaces shaped by oppression, dispossession, hardship, and destruction. The current genocide has underscored for students the necessity of engaging in deeper analytical inquiry to examine how such violence permeates not only space and thought but also the body, endurance, and the layers of life and death. This includes recognizing the resistance of those subjected to ongoing atrocities. 

Additionally, studying settler coloniality involves interrogating its global structures of power and its localized expressions. It also requires challenging the narratives perpetuated by media and even some academic work concerning time, space, camps, and geographies. In teaching this year, I emphasized that contemporary research and analytical frameworks often fail to register certain marginalized groups or afford them ontological recognition, further highlighting the need for critical and inclusive scholarship.

I found my experience at Princeton this year deeply fulfilling, as the students came with a remarkable willingness to learn and engage critically. Coming from firsthand experiences and a visceral understanding of the everyday realities of dispossession and destruction, I felt a profound sense of purpose in fostering critical dialogue. The ongoing genocide underscores the ethical, scholarly, and politico-psychological imperative to sustain critical, action-oriented analyses worldwide, particularly by engaging with the work of Southern anti-colonial and decolonial scholars who challenge us to reflect on the role of academic institutions and the responsibilities of academics. 

This year, I focused on cultivating a sense of care for the next generation of scholars by fostering what I describe as ethical intimacy in the classroom—creating a space where students feel empowered to think critically, stand tall analytically, and express themselves fully. By inventing new modes of politically responsible teaching, we can open spaces to examine, contain, and explore unregistered intimacies as acts of resistance against the ongoing monstrosity of violence and oppression. This approach emphasizes the transformative potential of education in confronting the injustices of our time

MM: Yeah, I really appreciate how you stress, that teaching and learning, with the present reality in Palestine and the proximity to it, gives greater clarity to what has been going on for even longer. The importance to take on the demands, and ethical concerns of this moment, to really consider what future is being forged, feels critical. 

I'm interested on what you describe earlier as unregistered intimacy. In your recent piece in Cultural Anthropology, where you're in conversation with the the surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah, and Sarah Ihmoud, an anthropologist, you work through Ashlaa’. This is an Arabic word that is translated loosely to scattered body parts. Yet by keeping the Arabic in the piece, you donate how it is really pointing to a larger lived reality for the people of Gaza. And for me, in reading the piece, this is not a narration of what's going on, but you work through how to even recognize what's going on, like how to train and equip one's eye, one's cognitive faculty, to give a grammar to the spectacle of violence, to hold it to account. It is also to try and recognize how people in Gaza are refusing and resisting this violence, how they are not reduced by it, and are practicing something of their own love, on their terms. And maybe this is the point about unregistered intimacy in ways that are not easily perceived? Can you tell us a little bit briefly about this piece? What does it mean to think with theory, with so much physical violence in this moment of ongoing genocide?

NSK: Yeah, this is a very good question and one of the topics that has been raised since this piece, on Ashlaa (in Arabic) and theorizing around body remains and scattered body parts, the dismembered flesh and bones that is repeatedly used by Palestinians in Gaza. In part, it is taking what we're all watching and seeing, and just naming it, staging it, registering it because usually the Palestinian body, the black body, the otherized body, does not register in the political mind/acts of the Western world. And Ashlaa, as an Arabic word captured part of my concerns when watching the genocide in Gaza now, and offered me a vital concept to grasp the situation and relationality between settler colonial land and life grab/elimination.

Ashlaa is about how the body/land is being dismembered, but I'm also speaking about the refusal of Ashlaa, what we call in Arabic Lamm or Lammlameh.  It is a refusal to be passive in this horrifying ongoing genocidal situation. So offering the concept of ashlaa, really helped me to see the enfleshment, to connect to writings like Hortense Spillers, where she's telling us we need to center on the flesh, like Fanon, where he talks about the importance of digging in the flesh and what the flesh becomes. Ashlaa is a word, that I really tried to explain, is a mode of thinking otherwise, a mode of refusing dismemberment. So it's the kind of anthropological work that sees, that names, that thinks together with the theory, but it's also a way of setting the imagination and setting the vitality of the freedom to read what is registered by the Ashlaa and to enliven the scattered. Ashlaa in my piece and in my theoretical work, really helps me to analyze, not only the political work of causing the body of the otherized to be scattered, it's also a way of unpacking the political work. It's also a way of borrowing from Gazans, from children's apprehensions. In the piece, I really work, to uncover the relations between the colonizer and the colonized, the settler, colonial, Imperial, genocidal force and the deadly, really deadly, overkillability, racialized hierarchy that is going on in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine.  It's a mode of pushing us beyond dismantling the necropolitical domain, and pushing us beyond the racialized command, to go and inquire really about the very tender, dismembered, wounded, dying, living body and flesh. It's a mode of thinking differently and thinking otherwise, and it's also a mode and a way of telling people nothing is unthinkable, even when you see the dismembered body remains.

And this is where I want us to go when I'm offering the concept of Ashlaa. You know in my work, really, I refer a lot to Sadiya Hartman and to Frantz Fanon when he talks about real leap. And there is a need for real leap in the struggle against Imperial, colonial and corporal violence. So, even as researchers, as academics and scholars, we really need to think about new and inventive modes of exposing brutality and wondering and connecting it to life and not the opposite, hence the need to engage with the work of Sherene Razack, Lean and Audra Simpson, Lara and Stephen Sheehi, in addition to South African scholars like Shahnaz Suffla, Seedat Mohamed, Garth Stevens and the like. Actually, one of the very important lessons I've learned from Palestinian poets from Darwish, to Abu Toha, Fadi Joudeh.. that when we as scholars write  about a scattered body, we can’t do it and allow the continued killing and killability, and when we write about a demolished house or a flattened land like Gaza today we can’t but make sure to bring it back to life, to human stories, to children playing, to culture, to continuity and livability. This is how I see my work, and therefore I think through  Ashlaa’ and Lammlameh that enliven the over-killed. I don't think you've heard me speaking about Lamm and Lammlameh, (Arabic words denoting modes of assembling, gathering and collective defiance to assert futurity and relationality) but that's my next move. Princeton gave me the space that I was able to move from Ashlaa to Lamm, and then from Lamm and Lammlameh, to looking at the mode of digging under the skin (when and while studying scabies). That actually was my last talk where I really engaged more with Ashlaa and bringing Palestinians, their witnessing and wounding into life and against death, in exposing how, no matter what Zionists and their Western allies are doing when trying to over kill the Paletestinians, Gazans are speaking connectivity to fathering like that father that was holding the plastic bag carrying the remains of his children and yelling/announcing- ‘these are my kids.’ And you see a grandfather holding his dead granddaughter and saying, ‘she is the soul of my soul’;  you know such faces and voices are the one’s that leads my Palestinian feminist scholarly-activism and theorization. They are my university, my teachers and guide.

So, if there is a Palestinian-ness of the flesh, especially when I'm theorizing around Ashlaa’, that requires that we think the flesh, not only as the physical body as a whole, but also the body in pieces, as when thinking about the Palestinian land in pieces. Affects in Ashlaa as geopolitics in the dismembered land-life in Palestine are viewed as one. And what you see Palestinian mothers, fathers, children, poets, lawyers, thinkers, mental health workers and more doing, and for years is trying to gather limbs and parts against the necrophilic need of the colonizer to keep on cutting and as Jaspir Puar powerfully explained maiming. Centering Ashlaa’ as my ontological point of departure [because it is really living through the flesh], is also my way of understanding the onto-raciality of Ashlaa’ and the way people are acting against it by speaking, demonstrating, teaching, loving, caring, and screaming like the Gazan father insisted;  ‘these are my kids’. This is where I am, and I continue to think about this more.

Alongside thinking on this, I am also (together with amazing abolitionist, and anti-colonial comrades from the South) creating an academic, scholarly movement named Al Hadenah Al Fikreyah- a de-territorialized space of thinking and mobilizing, that doesn't need a single university, but creates new spaces for thinkers and scholar-activists to write otherwise, to move, act, and otherwise.  

MM: One of the things that I'm also hearing as you're describing and thinking through, is also problematizing some of the conventions around describing academic work, and so far as, when you talk about Ashlaa’ as a concept, it's both a concept and it's not a concept. And when you talk about, theorizing, there's not just the act of theoretical engagement, there's also a real kind of intervention and emplacement of your work within a situation that is lived, that is visceral. I suppose for me, one of these things that anthropology supposedly declares of itself is that it is a discipline that necessarily is in the world, yet it needs to do more to somehow actually really push the genre of what theory means, when it is detached from praxis, or what is a metaphor excavated from the material that makes it possible. I think you also pushing that, and that feels really important to continue to do so. 

This really came out over the last year, as you know, at Princeton and at many universities where there was a lot of kind of different types of organizing and activism around holding the institution, our individual home departments and the intellectual communities we are in, to account. In this department, there was a movement around really trying to have a conversation around what was going on in Gaza, which I think was one of the kinds of motivations, and a part of the process that, resulted in the appointment of a Palestinian academic such as yourself in this moment, and for us to have this conversation now. 

In light of this, I wonder what advice would you give to students of anthropology or people who are interested in anthropology, to help them in entering the academy and working the academy, while holding onto their ethical commitment, in this moment? And, if you were to reflect on your own experience and position now, what lessons do you wish you had learned earlier in your career? What advice would you have given your younger self? 

NSK: When I received the invitation from Princeton, it prompted deep reflection on the nature of academic engagement and its ethical responsibility in times of profound crisis, such as genocide. For years, my conversations have predominantly involved anthropologists, mental health workers, legal scholars, geographers, criminologists, and other social scientists, but this opportunity presented a moment to reconsider the role of knowledge production within an academic institution in the context of ongoing violence and suffering. The significance of our work, particularly in moments like genocide, extends beyond theorization to active mobilization. In such times, academic institutions should be spaces where we confront the realities of violence and injustice by actively engaging with moral, ethical, legal, and intellectual frameworks in ways that respond to and challenge ongoing atrocities.

As scholars, we cannot continue as if the world of knowledge production remains separate from the harsh realities faced by precarious populations. It is essential to reconsider the purpose and potential of academia, especially when confronted with the destruction of universities, research labs, and intellectual communities—as we are witnessing in Gaza, where the lives of students, researchers, and professors have been tragically cut short. In these contexts, how can we continue to teach, theorize, and write if we are unable to acknowledge and respond to the political and moral urgency of these crises?

The invitation from Princeton, in many ways, was a surprise—yet it presented an opportunity to rethink my relationship with knowledge, the university, and the broader academic community. It allowed me to work alongside students and faculty to critically examine how we write, theorize, and engage with the denial of genocide, particularly in a time when institutions of higher education are being destroyed and their academic communities annihilated. This requires a shift in our understanding of the university’s role. If we, as scholars, cannot change the politics and political economy of knowledge production and in turn world politics within these spaces, what is the point of continuing our work in such environments?

My argument is that our work does matter—whether in our conversations, our writings, or in our refusal to remain silent. We live in a moment of both despair and immense power. This is a revolutionary moment in which we must reclaim the time we have and use it to build spaces of life, not death. As scholars, we must embrace this responsibility, rethinking how we conceptualize love, grief, and thinking itself. In the classroom and beyond, love is integral to the way we teach, engage, and produce knowledge. Love defines our language and impacts our methods of writing, thinking, and grieving. It is essential for creating an environment in which we can continue to think, feel, and act in response to the atrocities we witness.

Rather than asking what is worth dying for, we must shift the focus to what is worth living for. In this context, we are tasked with creating spaces of thinkability, even in the face of unthikable suffering. The academy, including anthropology, has the potential to create a "sixth sense" of knowledge—one that is contextualized, temporally aware, and deeply affective. This is knowledge that not only informs but also mobilizes, challenging the gatekeepers of academia who often exclude our histories, geographies, and lived experiences.

Today, we find ourselves at a crossroads where the gatekeepers of academia have constructed barriers that prevent the inclusion of vital histories, especially those related to the experiences of Palestinian people. As such, it is crucial to bring attention to the intimate and painful realities that are often erased or ignored—such as the destruction of homes and the transformation of bodies into ashlaa in Gaza. This is where anthropology (and other siences), in its most ethical form, must step in: to document, to care, and to ensure that these stories are not lost. We must engage in the work of Lammlameh—gathering and holding onto these narratives, keeping them alive.

In this moment, the role of knowledge and scholarship extends beyond traditional academic pursuits. It is a mode of gathering, of creating an intellectual space that transcends boundaries and offers a new way of thinking—one that is grounded in southernist liberation and solidarity. This is not an easy task, and the current political climate only underscores the need for such an approach. The failure of academia to engage meaningfully with the struggles faced by marginalized communities demands a rethinking of how we approach education and knowledge production.

As we reflect on the devastation in Gaza, where universities and intellectual communities are reduced to rubble, it is critical to remember that our work as scholars is not detached from the suffering of those whose lives and knowledge are under siege. Writing, theorizing, and mobilizing in these times are acts of resistance. By engaging in Lammlameh, we assert that our knowledge must live and that our writing must continue to build life—despite the forces that seek to erase it. The carcerality of academia, its exclusionary structures, must be challenged. For every child born in Gaza, and for every person affected by this brutal reality, it is our duty to work harder to produce a different way of thinking, writing, mobilizing and knowing. If we fail to do so, there will be no future, no movement, no change.

The academic space, for me, is not just a space of theory—it is a space of life. It is here, even amidst the rubble, that we must continue to create, to gather, to teach, to listen to our future generation, and to resist. This is where we are, and this is the space from which we must continue to work and think.