Producing Knowledge on Palestine from Jordan: (Re)thinking Fieldwork and Its Epistemological Issues

The workshop held on 1 July 2026 at Ifpo Amman explored Jordan’s role as a key site for the production of knowledge on Palestine through a multidisciplinary approach. It was conceived and organised by Raphaël Banc-Lévêque (Université Gustave Eiffel, Ifpo) and Thomas Michel (Université Paris Cité, Ifpo). It brought together around fifteen researchers, PhD students and researchers from the French National Research Center (CNRS).

Discussions focused on archives produced and preserved in Jordan, cross-border circulation of people and knowledge, and intersecting cultural scenes, highlighting how research conducted from Jordan offers distinctive perspectives on Palestine.

Introduction

Agnès Favier (Director of Ifpo’s Department of Contemporary Studies) and Mariangela Gasparotto (Researcher in the same department) opened the workshop by reaffirming Ifpo’s commitment to supporting research on and from the region, a mission all the more important in times of war and uncertainty.

Raphaël Banc-Lévêque then outlined the workshop’s objectives, academic framework, and origins. The project was launched in March 2025 following a shared observation with Thomas Michel that Amman was playing an increasingly important role in their respective research, whether by choice or necessity, owing to the growing difficulty of accessing Palestinian field sites, a situation that has worsened considerably since 7 October 2023 and the devastating war that followed in Gaza.

The workshop therefore examined Jordan as a signification and distinctive vantage point from which to study Palestine. It also connected with the recent revival of social science research on Jordan, exemplified by issue No. 157 (2025) of the Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée (REMMM), Nationhood in the Middle East: Jordan as a Case Study. The volume was presented the previous day at the French Institute of Amman by Norig Neveu (CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université, IREMAM), followed by a discussion with Faisal Alrefai (University of Jordan), Mariangela Gasparotto, and Raphaël Banc-Lévêque. The event reflected the growing scholarly interest in Jordan, within which the workshop sought to position itself.

Opening the workshop, Tariq Tell (Associate Professor, American University of Beirut) provided a historiographical framework through an analysis of debates on Jordanian identity. He highlighted the tension between a Western interpretation portraying Jordan as a British colonial creation tied to the Palestinian question and a Transjordan perspective emphasising an older national identity. He also showed how the kingdom’s political choices, particularly after its disengagement from the West Bank in 1988 and the Oslo Accords of 1993, reshaped the state while leaving unresolved the place of Jordanians of Palestinian origin within the nation. This issue remains central to Jordanian politics and informed the discussions that followed.

Archives, corpus and knowledge production: studying Palestine from Jordanian collections

Norig Neveu presented ongoing research on literary culture and religious authorities in the Hebron region from the late nineteenth century, drawing on the private archives of the al-Kafafi family held in Amman. She showed how these documents shed light on local religious practices and, at the same time, bring often-overlooked “middle towns” back into focus. These archives also offer new perspectives on Palestine’s social and cultural history through family networks, knowledge transmission, and the impact of migration and the Nakba on the preservation of collective memory.

Daoud Ghoul (PhD student, Newcastle University) examined Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967 using public archives in Amman (Ministry of Interior) and Jerusalem (Israel State Archives), alongside private collections (Khazaeen). He demonstrated how Jordanian archives illuminate the urban development of Jerusalem, particularly in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah. Rather than merely substituting for less accessible Palestinian archives, he argued, these collections constitute an essential corpus for renewing the study of Jerusalem. He also stressed the importance of collaborative, relational approaches between researchers and institutions to improve archival access, while arguing that archives also serve purposes beyond academia by providing material evidence of the existence and rights of the Palestinian people.

Closing the panel, Dima Abu Alkheir (PhD student, University of Hamburg, German Institute for Global and Area Studies) discussed the Hashemite Custodianship of Jerusalem since 1967 and the ways in which the Jordanian monarchy has built its religious legitimacy around the Holy Sites. She argued that this legitimacy rests not only on official discourse and political agreements, but also on institutional, religious and administrative practices. Jordanian archives (including Friday sermons, fatwas, waqf records and restoration files) therefore constitute key sources for studying these issues.

The discussion, led by Candice Raymond (CNRS, Centre d’Histoire sociale des mondes contemporains), first addressed why Jordanian archival collections remain comparatively underused in research on Palestine. She then situated the debate within the archival turn of the 1990s, emphasising that archives are both historical sources and objects of analysis. As such, they generate knowledge not only about Palestine but also about Jordan. Participants also discussed the ethical challenges of researching Palestine today. While Jordanian archives provide invaluable resources, they warned that increasing reliance on them could further marginalise Palestinian collections, already fragmented and weakened by colonial conditions and wartime restrictions. Jordanian and Palestinian archives should therefore be viewed as complementary rather than competing repositories, ensuring that research conducted from Jordan strengthens rather than displaces scholarship produced from Palestine itself.

Circulations and Borders

In the second panel, Marion Lauréat-Macé (PhD student, Université Lyon 3) examined how changes in Arabic legal terminology in the Palestinian press (1917-1993) reflect evolving conceptions of territory, borders and sovereignty. Combining linguistics, legal studies, semiotics and the analysis of identity documents, she demonstrated how language shapes representations of space, highlighting the relevance of this approach to the Jordanian-Palestinian context, where borders are defined by historical legacies, cross-border mobility and contested forms of citizenship extending beyond territorial demarcation.

Suzan Emad Mohammad Al-Dababsa (Lecturer, University of Jordan) proposed a philosophical reading of the Jordanian-Palestinian border that moves beyond conventional Border Studies approaches centred on identity, mobility and sovereignty. She argued that the border is not merely a political boundary but also a social, historical and epistemic space shaping lived experience. Through the Jordanian case, she showed how it influences family ties, collective memory, belonging and the production of knowledge on Palestine. She suggested that borders do more than separate territories; they also shape particular forms of existence, consciousness and knowledge.

The discussion, chaired by Tariq Tell, broadened these reflections by considering border infrastructures as material elements generating border practices and shaping new forms of mobility, whether constrained or enabled. Participants also stressed the importance of situating the Jordanian-Palestinian border within the wider context of Jordan’s border, particularly the Jordanian-Syrian one. Such a perspective avoids treating the Jordanian-Palestinian border as exceptional and instead places it within a broader reflection on Jordan’s borderlands.

Cultures, Identities and Authenticity

The third and final panel opened with Salomé Mazure (Master’s student, Sciences Po Aix), who analysed the artistic practices of Palestinian women in response to the erasure of Palestinian archives and heritage. Based on fieldwork conducted between Amman and Palestine, she showed that the Jordanian capital has become a crucial space for the production, preservation and circulation of Palestinian art, particularly through cultural institutions such as Darat al-Funun. She nevertheless argued that producing art from Amman reshapes both artistic production and reception: while exile facilitates international circulation of artworks and the construction of narratives about Palestine, artists living under occupation tend to produce work more closely rooted in everyday experience.

Continuing this discussion, Taycir Nasraoui (PhD student, École supérieure de l’audiovisuel et du cinéma de Gammarth) argued that Jordan is not only a place of refuge for Palestinians in exile but also a major centre for producing and transmitting Palestinian memory through cinema. Drawing on films shot or produced in Jordan (When I Saw You, Aisha’s Story, Farha, 200 Meters and Theeb), she showed how Jordanian landscapes become spaces where narratives of exile, identity and belonging are constructed. She also highlighted the role of Jordanian cultural infrastructures in supporting the production and international circulation of transnational Palestinian cinema. Palestinian memory, she argued, is therefore shaped beyond Palestine’s territorial borders, although this mediation through Jordan inevitably influences the narratives reaching international audiences.

The discussion, led by Najla Nakhlé-Cerruti (CNRS, Ifpo) addressed the tension between asserting a distinct Palestinian national identity and participating in global artistic networks. Participants considered how the expectations of largely international audiences shape artists’ narrative and aesthetic choices. They also discussed the existence of possible “red lines” in artistic and cinematic practices, questioning both explicit and internalised constraints on representing Palestine from Jordan. Finally, they explored the role of the art and film markets, examining target audiences, distribution channels and their influence on artistic production. More broadly, participants reaffirmed Amman’s central position not only as a hub of artistic creation but also as a major site of memory-making and archival preservation.

Conclusion

The workshop demonstrated the value of archives in Jordan as a rich source for the (re)interpretation and production of knowledge on Palestine, through critical engagement with their contents, material forms, and circulation. It also examined borders as sites that generate rules, norms, practices, lived experiences, narratives, and, in turn, forms of knowledge. Finally, it explored the distinctive features and impact of artistic and cultural production about Palestine in Jordan.

Overall, the presentations and discussions demonstrated that Jordan should be understood not merely as an alternative field site for the study of Palestine, but as a privileged space for such research, shaped by its historical ties to Palestine. However, the richness of the Jordanian context should complement, rather than marginalise or obscure, the knowledge produced from Palestine itself.

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