Aman Abhishek
Aman Abhishek is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research is about people organizing with communication and media technologies to fight for justice.
Session
Palestinian, Israeli, and international anti-occupation activists in Israel/Palestine have been using cameras to deter and document violence from Israeli security forces and settlers for around two decades. Human rights organizations first started distributing cameras in the mid-2000s to facilitate documentation, and today, essentially every anti-occupation activist in the West Bank and Jerusalem carries some combination of video cameras, smartphones, and body cameras to deter and document state-settler violence. The activists also take it upon themselves to take the videos to journalists, human rights organizations, courts, and elsewhere; recently, this activism was the focus of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land. This talk will describe how activists organize, what happens to the footage, how this activism changed after October 7th, and what this all means for thinking about counter-surveillance as a strategic response to state violence.