Affective, Symbolic, and Family Ties Among Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel: A Multi-Sited Ethnography and a Transnational Research Agenda

Melding insights from recent works on the affective, embodied, and symbolic dimensions of transnationalism with multi-sited fieldwork in Palestinian localities across the Green Line between the West Bank and Israel, this paper aims to develop a transnational research agenda on Israeli and West Bank Palestinians. It argues that a focus on emotional ties, symbolic practices, and subjective views can help overcome the scholarly tendency to use the spatial and legal divisions imposed on differently situated Palestinians as boundaries for research and to assume that these imposed divisions are the most salient factors in their everyday lives. It also sketches a transnational research agenda on these two segments of Palestinians, discussing how a focus on everyday life and a multi-sited research design can help explore their various transnational engagements from the expression of feelings of solidarity and the pursuit of cross-border family practices to the negotiation of border-related perceptual and material differences. Second, beyond the case of Palestinians under Israeli rule, this paper problematizes the privileged focus on mobility in transnational studies and calls for more attention to the role of transnational histories and forms of belonging in the lives of people experiencing forced spatial immobility and legal exclusion.