Congratulations to Dr. Nili Belkind!

The Center for Ethnomusicology warmly congratulates Dr. Nili Belkind, who defended her dissertation on May 8, 2014.  Dr. Belkind's dissertation is entitled Music in conflict: Palestine, Israel, and the politics of aesthetic production.  It was sponsored (advised) by Prof. Christopher Washburne. 

Dr. Belkind's dissertation is an ethnographic study of the fraught and complicated cultural politics of music making in Israel-Palestine in the context of the post-Oslo era, a time of highly polarized sentiments and general retreat from the expressive modes of relationality that accompanied the 1990s peace process. In it, she examines the politics of sound and the ways in which music making and attached discourses reflect and constitute identities, and also, contextualize political action. Ethical and aesthetic positions that shape contemporary artistic production in Israel-Palestine are informed by profound imbalances of power between the State (Israel), the stateless (Palestinians of the oPt), the complex positioning of Israel’s Palestinian minority, and contingent exposure to ongoing political violence.