In this episode of Occupied Thoughts, FMEP Fellow Nour Joudah speaks with Cal State University-San Bernadino Professor Ahlam Muhtaseb. Dr. Muhtaseb is co-founder of the Phoenix of Gaza XR, an interactive virtual reality experience that captures the untold stories of Gaza’s people and its transformation and provides a deep dive into the lives of those who endure and rebuild. The project itself started well before the current genocide, but as a result has taken on a new form and meaning. Professors Joudah and Muhtaseb discuss the Phoenix of Gaza XR as a project and how audiences are responding to it, as well as the relationship between technology and social justice and the challenges and changes they’ve seen over many years of teaching on Palestine in the U.S. 

Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb is a professor of media studies and the graduate coordinator of the Department of Communication Studies at California State University, San Bernardino and the Ida B. Wells Senior Data Justice Fellow at Princeton University . She is also the recipient of numerous community and research awards including CSU-SB’s Outstanding Scholarship, Research, and Creative Activities and Faculty Mentor awards, the 2019 Rebuilding Alliance “Story Teller” award, and has been recently named the 2024 Women Support Organization’s Distinguished Woman of the Year. Prof. Muhtaseb co-produced and co-directed the film 1948: Creation & Catastrophe, a documentary focusing on the catastrophic consequences of 1948 for the Palestinian nation. It has been screened at over 20 film festivals and at universities and community organizations. In 2019, the film won the Jerusalem International Film Festival’s Special Jury Award. She is also the producer and lead researcher of the documentary 36 Seconds: Portrait of a Hate Crime which centered the three young Muslims murdered in Chapel Hill in 2015 and discusses the state of hate crimes, Islamophobia, and racism in the United States. 

Nour Joudah is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA and a former President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at UC-Berkeley (2022-23). Dr. Joudah completed her PhD in Geography at UCLA (2022), and wrote her dissertation Mapping Decolonized Futures: Indigenous Visions for Hawaii and Palestine on the efforts by Palestinian and native Hawaiian communities to imagine and work toward liberated futures while centering indigenous duration as a non-linear temporality. Her work examines mapping practices and indigenous survival and futures in settler states, highlighting how indigenous countermapping is a both cartographic and decolonial praxis. She also has a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and wrote her MA thesis on the role and perception of exile politics within the Palestinian liberation struggle, in particular among politically active Palestinian youth living in the United States and occupied Palestine. Prof. Joudah is a 2024 FMEP non-residential Fellow.