Caitlin Davis

Preliminary abstract: The following project is an ethnographic study of the political-military immediacy of architectural heritage and its preservation in Israel/Palestine. By combining participant observation and semi-structured interviews, this project will map the networks of Israeli heritage conservation, identifying the technological devices, disciplinary practices, and bodily movements that shape the kinds of interventions of Israeli conservation architects. The goal of this project is to confront politically reductionist examinations of the question of Palestine and its (settler) colonial dimensions–examinations that often envision ‘the political’ as an external and individually guided force affecting the content of heritage practices. Instead, this project seeks to explore the extent to which the power to colonize is part and parcel of the discipline of Israeli architectural conservation. It is an effort to understand the activities through which Israeli heritage conservation might (and might not) generate and perpetuate the power to colonize–the power to enact the forms of governmentality and the networks of governance that are part of an ontologically multiple Israeli state.