2025-26 CHI Graduate Fellow
Hey everyone!
I’m Ayaat Ismail, a third-year PhD student in English at Michigan State with a focus on women and gender studies. I’ve also got certificates in film studies and global studies, and I’m working on a digital humanities one too. Honestly, I’m equal parts excited and nervous to be part of the CHI Fellowship this year!
My research examines Palestinian literature and film in the twenty-first century as counter-cartographic practices within sociopolitical movements of resistance. It’s a mix of memory studies, surveillance studies, spatial humanities, and cultural preservation so I’m all over the place in the best way. Specifically, I analyze how writers and filmmakers use narratives and visual forms to map both memory and spatial experience, thereby opposing the surveillance systems that have sought to render Palestinian space controllable rather than livable. I’m particularly interested in how surveillance infrastructure—checkpoints, prisons, and guard towers—transforms geographical spaces into sites of arbitrary power, and in how these spaces can be reimagined as sites of resistance through sumud, a concept that explores Palestinian steadfastness and creative persistence, particularly through cultural production.
Drawing on Foucault’s concept of the “panoptic gaze,” I map out surveillance areas to understand how they function as mechanisms of control and, crucially, how Palestinian artists exploit what I see as surveillance’s “blind spots” to create counter-archives of spatial knowledge. When surveillance technologies generate panoptic, controlling maps, they inevitably produce gaps, and literature and film can actively exploit these gaps, opening areas for exploration within the apparatus rather than just documenting what monitoring overlooks. This is where things get really interesting for me: Palestinian artists aren’t simply recording the effects of occupation; they’re strategically working within and against the limitations of surveillance systems to transform those gaps into sites of counter-archival knowledge production.
I come from a pretty traditional background in literary studies, but lately I’ve been getting really into digital approaches. After spending time with composition pedagogy, creative nonfiction, and scholarly analysis, I’ve started thinking more about how digital tools can do more than just analyze culture; they can actually help preserve and make visible the stories that often get pushed aside or entirely erased. What really gets me going is the idea of “living archives,” basically, memory that’s active and constantly evolving. I’m fascinated by how everyday spaces—homes, neighborhoods, objects, films, and books—become repositories of shared memory, especially in contested spaces where official narratives seek to erase certain histories.
The filmmakers I work with, like Mai Masri, Annemarie Jacir, and Farah Nablusi, do amazing work documenting how memory and physical infrastructure are connected. My recent work examines how literature and film function as complementary counter-cartographic methods: while film depicts the materiality of confinement through checkpoint architecture and bodily movement through surveillance infrastructures like drones and biometric databases, literature maps what surveillance is unable to document, the interior consciousness and temporal memory. Together, these create what I see as a spatial counter-archive of Palestinian knowledge that restores coherence to fragmented space. As Michel de Certeau observes, “what the map cuts up, the story cuts across,” and I want to trace this counter-cartographic potential through Palestinian cultural production.
I just finished up a StoryMaps project on surveillance in Palestinian film that traces how characters navigate checkpoints and other controlled spaces. It gave me a taste of what spatial mapping technologies can do (even in a pretty basic way), but it also made me realize how much I still need to learn. For example, mapping a single checkpoint in Farah Nablusi’s film The Present revealed that it becomes more than just a physical place; it’s a symbol of constant monitoring and ongoing humiliation, where power is repeatedly used to transform the everyday act of passage into a cycle of exposure and obstruction. That project was really just scratching the surface, but it opened my eyes to the possibilities of using digital tools to make visible the spatial logics of occupation and resistance.
I’m coming into this fellowship wanting to build more technical skills for sure, so things like spatial mapping, data visualization, maybe even some basic coding, but just as important to me is being part of a community where we can think critically about the politics of digital work. Questions like: Who controls digital infrastructure? Whose stories get centered in digital archives? How do we ensure our tools actually challenge power structures rather than just reinforce them? These questions feel especially urgent given the nature of my work, where the stakes aren’t just academic but deeply tied to ongoing violence, erasure, and resistance.
I’m still figuring out what direction my fellowship project might take, but I’m imagining something that uses spatial mapping and digital storytelling to trace how surveillance infrastructures fragment Palestinian space across multiple films and literary texts. I want to create something that’s not just analytical but also accessible, something that could help people outside academia understand how Palestinian artists are doing this incredible work of resistance through their creative production. Maybe it’ll be an interactive map, maybe a digital archive, maybe something I haven’t even thought of yet. I’m excited to see where conversations with all of you take me.
Through my work, I hope to demonstrate how movement, memory, and resistance intersect in Palestinian literature and film, and how digital humanities methods can help transform surveillance gaps into sites of counter-archival knowledge production, reclaiming spaces of control as sites of dignity, defiance, and hope. Can’t wait to share what I’m working on and learn from all of you over the coming weeks!
Recent Comments