Checkpoint Time

Walk This Way: Fitbit and Other Kinds of Walking in Palestine

“…Erasing or displacing Palestinian presence and stopping movement in the Palestinian territories is the way Israelis establish continual sovereign moments, proving who is ultimately in charge of the territory (see Tawil‐Souri 2017, 400). Julie Peteet's (2017) rich ethnography describes the myriad ways of restricting Palestinian movement in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, documenting the negative effects of stasis, being stuck, obstructed, and delayed against one's will.…”

“…Even as Israel is known for its lucrative high-tech surveillance technology exports, the low-tech tactics of ID cards and permits, so memorably described in the poet Mahmud Darwish' s "Identity Card," hold immense significance and power. Inexpensive, fragile material objects, they and their colors resemble the checkpoints in their ability to determine possibilities of movement or lack thereof (Tawil- Souri 2010Souri , 2011Souri , 2016Souri , 2017; see also Berda 2018, 107-124 on the "effective inefficiency" of the Israeli permit regime). Palestinians of course also engage in other-surveillance as they learn to read and manage the fear of the armed soldiers and settlers in the West Bank to maintain their own safety.…”

Disrupting movements, synchronising schedules

“…Allen 2008; Backmann 2010; Fieni 2014). Several scholars see the Israeli mobility regime as creating two distinct temporalities, one for Palestinians and another for Jewish Israelis, often noting that the two are relational (Weizman 2007;Handel 2009;Parizot 2009;Pullan 2013a;Tawil-Souri 2017;Peteet 2018).…”

Book Review: The Procrastination Economy: The Big Business of Downtime

“…This recent interest in the history and regimes of waiting-as demonstrated by Helga Tawil Souri (2017), Jason Farman (2018), and the contributors to Manpreet K. Janeja and Andreas Bandak's edited collection, Ethnographies of Waiting (2018)-helps us map the paradox by which waiting is crucial for supporting digital business models that supposedly hail speed and instant gratification. 3 Building on a plethora of contemporary thinkers and media scholars, Tussey expands existing theories of on-demand culture to include what he calls "the procrastination economy," for example, the monetization of "in-between moments," such as the daily commute or waiting for the doctor, by media and tech companies. Shifting the focus from domestic screens to smartphones, he describes mobile media as "the forefront of the power struggle between a digitally empowered audience and the media conglomerates that seek to harness and commercialize online behavior."…”