news – Decolonising Global Health Archive

By Arab Urbanism (Dena Qaddumi, Nadi Abusaada , Majd Al-Shihabi , Ammar Azzouz , Samia Henni , Lana Judeh , Faiq Mari, Aya Nassar, and Omar Jabary Salamanca).

Palestine: Spaces and Politics (PSP) is an open-access project that offers resources for education and research on Palestine’s built and natural environments through a critical lens. This initiative is a response to the growing demand for grounded academic resources on Palestine that offer depth and context beyond immediate colonial destruction.

The PSP Introductory Curriculum positions Palestine as a complex space inhabited by people who are producers of its own knowledge, rather than a mere object on which perpetual violence is inflicted. It situates Palestine as a conceptual site to reconsider core ideas in the fields of architecture, geography, urbanism, and planning. Particularly, by foregrounding Palestinian voices and perspectives, PSP presents substantive and vivid understandings of Palestine’s past, present, and potential futures. Ultimately, the curriculum considers Palestine as imperative for analyzing the critical intersections of spaces and politics at large.

The bilingual curriculum comprises several themes that include an opening text, key questions, key cases, and open-access readings. We also provide further readings and audiovisual material and have aimed to include resources useful for both academic and non-academic users.

Access their site here.

By Heather R. Hlavka and Sameena Mulla

For victims in sexual assault cases, trials rarely result in justice. Instead, the courts drag defendants, victims, and their friends and family through a confusing and protracted public spectacle. Along the way, forensic scientists, sexual assault nurse examiners, and police officers provide their insight and expertise, shaping the story that emerges for the judge and jury. These expert narratives intersect with the stories of victims, witnesses, and their communities to reproduce our cultural understandings of sexual violence, but too often this process results in reinscribing racial, gendered, and class inequalities.

Bodies in Evidence draws on observations of over 680 court appearances in Milwaukee County’s felony sexual assault courts, as well as interviews with judges, attorneys, forensic scientists, jurors, sexual assault nurse examiners, and victim advocates. It shows how forensic science helps to propagate public misunderstandings of sexual violence by bestowing an aura of authority to race and gender stereotypes and inequalities. Expert testimony reinforces the idea that sexual assault is physically and emotionally recognisable and always leaves material evidence. The court’s reliance on the presence of forensic evidence infuses these very familiar stereotypes and myths about sexual assault with new scientific authority.

Read the book here.

By Mythheli Sreenivas

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonised some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe.

To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions-about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world.

Read the book here.

Tag: news

Palestine: Spaces and Politics

Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India