VC Faculty Lounge (first floor), Academic Block, LUMS
Abstract
This session featured Dr. Rabia Kamal as the speaker and was moderated by Aimen Bucha. The talk examined how, over the past two years, the ongoing genocide in Palestine has been witnessed globally in real time through digital media. From videos documenting extreme violence to everyday moments shared by Palestinians on the ground, alongside social media trends displaying celebratory violence by Israeli soldiers, Dr. Kamal underscored how digital documentation has shaped global awareness, affect, and political response.
Drawing on ten months of autoethnographic fieldwork, the talk encouraged the audience to reflect on how consuming and circulating such images produces forms of digital witnessing. Using a decolonial feminist analytical framework, Dr. Kamal explored how the digital archive of Palestinian suffering exposes the entanglements of digital capitalism, gendered necropolitics, and the uneven distribution of visibility and grief.
The discussion centered on how engagement with Gaza’s digital genocide lays bare the ways digital infrastructures reinforce gendered regimes of disposability, how this moment has further implicated Western feminism’s historical and contemporary complicity in imperial power, and how gender and sexual minorities in the global South strategically mobilize digital tools to forge new forms of social and political relationality—even under conditions of surveillance, harassment, and online violence.
By foregrounding the politics of witnessing, the session highlighted how digital archives of violence are not merely records but active sites of resistance, grief, and solidarity. The talk invited a deeper interrogation of how digital publics respond to atrocity, and what forms of feminist praxis become possible—and necessary—within this landscape of mediated violence.
Media Gallery
