News/Research

Commons Conversations Video Now Online: Liat Berdugo

07 Dec, 2021

Commons Conversations Video Now Online: Liat Berdugo

You can now watch the moving Commons Conversations lecture with Liat Berdugo on "Seeing is Not Enough: Citizen Videography in Israel-Palestine”!

In this talk, Prof. Liat Berdugo discusses her new book, The Weaponized Camera in the Middle East (Bloomsbury / I.B.Tauris, 2021), which draws on unprecedented access to the citizen-recorded video archives of B'Tselem, an Israeli NGO that distributes cameras to Palestinians living in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, to offer a contribution to the discourse of human rights work through the documentary form of imagemaking. Using video stills as core material, Berdugo asks how what is seen, but also who is seeing, affects how conflicts are visually recorded. She argues that visual evidence alone is not enough, because more is at stake in these conflicts than visuality: believing precedes seeing, and seeing fails to alter belief. She is joined by UC Berkeley’s Prof. Keith Feldman, author of A Shadow over Palestine.

Watch the video here or below!