This Is a Finding, Too: Alternative Institutional Structures and Policies in Israeli-Palestinian Shared Society Programs

• In Event: Participatory Action Research as Remedy and Repair With/in Indigenous, International, and Educational Communities

Abstract

Research on Israeli-Palestinian shared society programs has focused on attitude and behavioral changes of participants, perceived as the main way to foster interpersonal and systemic change in Palestine-Israel. I argue that investigating programs’ inner workings is equally relevant as they deliver educational programming while plagued by settler colonialism and neoliberal policies. This article investigates how former staff and students of Israeli-Palestinian music education-dialogue programs in a participatory action research project utilized feedback loops as subversive research designs to co-construct alternative institutional culture designs and structures for shared society educational research collectives. I draw implications from “pre-work” data analysis of feedback loops for policy recommendations surrounding bound and unbounded binationality and democratizing hierarchies, leading to the redesigning Israeli-Palestinian shared society programs.

Author

• Shoshana Gottesman, Teachers College, Columbia University