Caitlin Davis

CAITLIN M. DAVIS, then a graduate student at University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, was awarded a grant in October 2016 to aid research on ‘Drafting Governance: An ‘Architecture’ of Israeli Heritage Conservation,’ supervised by Dr. Les Field. The political-military immediacy of architecture in Israel has rarely been questioned, creating a space for scholars, journalists, and politicians to treat the preservation or destruction of particular historic sites as a central component of Israeli nation-building projects. This study examines specific episodes in the architectural conservation of the Old City of Acre. The events it describes are noticeably mundane. They are about the bureaucratic fingers that point at buildings and the measuring tapes that enact their boundaries. They are about the invisible agents that populate lives and that circulate through buildings, agents that conservation architects have only recently learned to ‘see’ and tried to enroll. By studying in detail how architectural conservation works in the Old City of Acre, this project examines the strategies of coordination that help to perform the subjects and the objects that populate these episodes. It studies the ways in which human and nonhuman actants come together, if only partially, enacting different versions of government along the way. This partiality is important. Sometimes, it is this sort of fractional coherence that actually allows (settler colonial) governance to succeed, to flatline, to fail.