Thayer Hastings

This research examines the crisis of maintaining a demographic majority from the site of Jerusalem and from the perspective of the population defined as the threat within that crisis. It examines their modes of proof and experiences living within the bureaucratic instrument that anchors their continued access to the city. It proposes to interpret that instrument, permanent residency status and the ‘center of life’, from the scale of the city and from the experiences of its subjects. This bureaucratic mechanism places the burden of proof on individual Palestinian Jerusalemites to demonstrate their presence to the state that defines them as in-excess. The research ethnographically examines how the ‘center of life’ is remade by the Palestinians who must, by definition, subscribe to it and what this reveals about the politics of majoritarianism. Studying how Palestinians in Jerusalem make a ‘center of life’ is an opportunity to learn how difference is remade and lived through modes of non-normative collectivity. By centering the figure of the non-citizen and non-migrant and relations at the scale of the everyday and municipal, we might find a configuration of community that challenges conceptions of subjectivity and differentiation, and sovereignty and colonialism. What forms of community emerge instead?