Thayer Hastings

Grant Type

Dissertation Fieldwork Grant

Institutional Affiliation

New York, Graduate Center, City U. of

Grant number

Gr. 10512

Approve Date

April 6, 2023

Project Title

Hastings, Thayer (New York, Graduate Center, City U. of) "The Demographic Governance of non-Citizenship: Inhabiting the “Center of Life” in Jerusalem"

THAYER HASTINGS, then a graduate student at City University of New York, Graduate Center, New York, New York, was awarded a grant in April 2023 to aid research on “The Demographic Governance of non-Citizenship: Inhabiting the “Center of Life” in Jerusalem,” supervised by Dr. Gary Wilder. Neither citizens nor migrants, Palestinian residents of Jerusalem are required to regularly prove that their “center of life” is within municipal limits or risk residency revocation and expulsion even if their families have lived in the city for generations. From a site of governmental hyperactivity, the research for this dissertation documented how the practices and strategies people on the borders of inclusion within the nation-state model deploy in pursuit of the “center of life.” Ethnographic and historical research was conducted to attend to the local scale and immediate spaces of life in order to investigate the “center of life” as a crucible for reconsidering foundational political categories. The case of Jerusalem and Palestinians’ non-normative struggles over domination can help clarify the stakes of scholarship through attention to what it takes to center a life within circumscribed inhabitance and, therefore, what that might reveal about the possibilities for association beyond the frameworks of nationalism, citizenship, and sovereignty.