Marianna Reis

MARIANNA B. REIS, then a graduate student at University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, was awarded a grant in October 2017 to aid research on ‘Dilemmas of Citizenship: Making Claims and Making Meaning Among Palestinian Citizenship of Israel,’ supervised by Dr. Francis Cody. Renamed ‘Mobilizing Citizenship: Navigating Urban Infrastructure and Planning Advocacy for Palestinian Citizens of Israel,’ this dissertation investigates how Palestinian citizens of Israel make sense of citizenship and belonging through everyday experiences of mobility and encounters with urban infrastructures, and how those encounters shape the conditions for mobilizing strategies of claims-making around urban infrastructural upgrade. Daily commuting through Arab and Jewish localities in the Galilee is one key way that Palestinians form and express a situated knowledge of formal citizenship and planning as technologies of settler colonial governance, differentiation, and dispossession. Nonetheless, planning justice advocates mobilize citizenship rights and planning expertise as tools of democratization and even political resistance. This project explores how Palestinian urban (im)mobility shapes demands and contestations over urban infrastructural development, and how they are rendered (un)intelligible and (il)legitimate in different formal and informal sites where citizenship is (re)constituted — from street protests, to grassroots planning workshops, to objection hearings, to the media, and traffic jams. This project shows that strategic engagements with state institutions, discourses, and formal procedures, and with informal, grassroots, and insurgent politics, are not incommensurable — they are mutually enabling, ambiguously bounded, and deeply entangled. This approach illuminates the ongoing relational practices that ‘make up’ urban citizenship and mobility, and animate social, political, and urban life among Palestinians in Israel.