Summer school

About the International Summer School

The International Summer School at CSRC is an innovative global collaborative with the New School University/ NY. It brings together scholars as well as graduate students from all over the world to think, study and contextualize about current and pressing issues in the field of the Social Sciences and the Humanities

These students come to AAUP’s Ramallah campus to take interdisciplinary courses, weekly weekend explorative trips, summer-long internships and Arabic Instructive courses. Students are partnered with local Palestinian students in an effort to familiarize them with the Palestinian environment through the experience of students. They are then partnered with local institutions to complete a summer long internship three days of the week while taking courses on campus two days a week. Weekends are reserved for trips throughout Palestine.

Summer School Courses (2023)

Palestinian identity and culture

Is it a social construct or an embodiment of our innate human qualities? From the day we are born into this world, we are labeled and defined by the people around us and ourselves. This topic will be the focus of this course; How to formulate and reinforce identity, whether by the individual (as a social entity) or society.

Settler colonialism in comparative perspective

When Patrick Wolfe proposed fifteen years ago that we view settler colonialism as a structure (rather than an event), he launched a new field in historical sociology now known as “settler colonialism.” This research project combines history and sociology to understand how European settlement in 'new lands' worked.

Decolonizing Design/Space

To understand the intricate systems and culture of control in a settler colonial context, one needs to decipher the socio-cultural space to unearth the tools of subjugation and control that the colonial power utilized for its control of local population.

In this course, we examine the lived space as a space for disclosing relations of subjugation, control, competition over land and resources, discourse framing, national identity, modernity, and urban planning…
The second part explores the diverse methods of research for a critical decolonial approach. Emphasis on narrative construction, planning and design as a manifestation of culture, the environment, and knowledge production.

Politics of Exile

An intersectional analysis of the Politics of exile and the making of diasporic subjectivity. This course explores the diverse Palestinian diasporic being and explores the experiences, representations and implications of forced displacement and migration.
In this course we build on theories of decoloniality, displacement, refugeeism, forced migration, colonization, globalization, and diasporic communities. The course will study the diverse Palestinian diasporic experiences and their manifestations on the Palestinian community in Jordan, and the larger Palestinian nation. We will dwell on key themes such as identity formation, history, culture, memory and trauma, modes of resistance, politics of representation, culture, diasporic lived experiences, justice and social change…