Living Against All Odds: Minor Practices and Alternative Futures in Palestine

Born of a desire to intensify the creation of alternative futures underway, this thesis explores how Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territory of the West Bank fabricate interstices to reclaim forms of social life and make their own futures otherwise. In an era when politics-as-usual is failing if not making things worse, this project explores what might come into view by subtly shifting our focus to that which lies below the threshold of the politically perceptible. Indeed, at the heart of this project is a speculative mode of attentiveness to what, after Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I call ‘minor practices’. These are understood as everyday social and aesthetic practices whose efficacy lies in creating subtle shifts in the texture of experience, generating conditions for change that at first glance seem imperceptible. As such, this project consents to the risk of attuning not to the staggering (and horrifying) genocidal efforts by Israel’s occupation of Gaza, or to the dynamics of political contestation that have always been part of the long history of the occupation, but to the unsung and unsuspected vitality that subtends everyday Palestinian creativity and resourcefulness. This includes the making of a home in a refugee camp; the weaving of interventions in the craft of embroidery; the use of humour in forms of protest; and the inventive prototyping practices of a design label. By bearing witness to how Palestinians in the West Bank continue to endeavour to make their lives liveable and to affirm their vitality in defiance of the politics of erasure, my aim is to show how minor practices create openings amidst a sense of widespread political failure and despair. As the thesis suggests, minor practices render the past a future in-the-making where possible futures become woven into the present, multiplying what could be as they transform what is.