Public Defence: Husam Abusalem

Husam Abusalem will defend his thesis for the degree of philosophiae doctor (PhD) at the University of South-Eastern Norway.

The doctoral work has been carried out at the Faculty of Humanities, Sports, and Educational Science.

All interested parties are welcome to the trial lecture and defence, either in person or digitally.

• Link to the thesis will follow.

Summary

What does dignity mean to the oppressed? 

This question is what this article-based PhD dissertation set to answer. It does so by attending to four recurring micro-gestures of Palestinian anticolonial resistance each of which explicitly demanded dignity in ways that exceed and unsettle its dominant understanding as a mere sacredness of human worth.

The dissertation is constituted of four articles, each of which attends to an encounter with dignity in Palestine that left the researcher disturbed or unsettled but also offered a distinct dimension or manifestation of dignity as it is lived under oppression. 

The four select encounters are: 

• the acts of the pallbearers during the funeral of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and their refusal to let the casket fall despite brutal assault by the Israeli apartheid police; 
• the hunger strikes of Palestinian political prisoners and their refusal of political imprisonment under the Israeli apartheid regime; 
• the affective, spatial, and political responses of Palestinians in Gaza and their attempts to sleep amid genocide; and 
• the recurring, fleeting smiles of Palestinians amid arrest and moments of humiliation across the fragmented geographies of Palestine. 

Taken together, the findings of this dissertation and its constituent articles reveal an affective spectrum of experiences and expressions of dignity and (re)introduce the concept as an affective, relational, and politically situated experience that is simultaneously sacred and profaned; empowering and burdensome; demanded and violated; felt and expressed. 

The cumulative theoretical contribution of this dissertation explains the relation between ‘what dignity is’, ‘what dignity does’, and ‘what dignity feels like’. It does so by introducing a counter-theorisation of dignity as a situated emotional apparatus; one that encompasses a wide affective spectrum, from a passive sensation of human worth to an active, embodied indignation and refusal of humiliation. 

In this framework, dignity can be invoked in acts of political refusal, provoked by the exhausting responsibility of maintaining it under conditions of prolonged oppression, evoked through the body as a counter-aesthetics of resistance, and revoked in response to the betrayal of the collective cause of a liberated Palestine.