Unsettled Belonging

"Unsettled Belonging" is an ethnographic study that focuses on how young Palestinian Americans navigated and constructed belonging and citizenship; and it examines their encounters with an exclusionary politics of belonging that emerged out of the routine practices of everyday U.S. nationalism "inside their schools" in the post 9-11 decade. At the heart of this project rests a question about disjunctures of modern citizenship. Taking an anthropological perspective on citizenship as lived experiences through which people negotiate social, cultural, and political membership, anthropologist Thea Abu El-Haj analyzes a fundamental schism between the ways Palestinian American youth experienced and constructed transnational citizenship and belonging, and the ways they were positioned as impossible subjects of the nation, despite their official status as citizens."