People
Chris Harding
ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow
Chris Harding is a PhD candidate at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. His work focuses on labor and capital in the Mandate period (1922-1948) in Palestine. In 2024, his work, “Researching Palestine” featured in the Biennale De Venezia, as part of the exhibition South West Bank—Landworks, Collective Action and Sound and is available online at Jadaliyya. Recently he published an essay with the magazine Public Seminar titled, “A House in the Middle of the Road”, which examined the dual-colonisation of Palestine during the Great Revolt (1936-1939). Chris is a 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Fellow.
In summer 2026, I returned to Dar Jacir—an arts and research centre located in Bethlehem, Palestine—to complete a residency I began in the previous year. In 2025, I began trawling through the newspaper and magazine archives at Dar Jacir. Focusing on periodicals from the period I work on, the Mandate (1922–1948), I discovered a trove of rich journalistic writing between the late 1930s and late 1940s. Writers penned articles concerned with the past, present, and future, considering what was to become of Palestine, on—what they would later discover—was the eve of disaster.
Using the ERI/PS2 fellowship I was able to return to Palestine in 2026, and complete the work I had begun. Translating, editing, and collating essays, I organised a series of workshops and talks at Dar Jacir. In the workshops we discussed these articles, considering the conditions they were produced under and how these relate to the specific, fraught, yet similar situation Palestinians find themselves in today. Discussions concerned the role of the youth, the position of women in society, nationalism, pan-Arabism, colonialism, and capitalism. The workshops reminded me of the beauty of coproductive history work. That is: turning private, squirreled away sources into public information—opening up the archive which is estranged from people, generally, but doubly so in Palestine.
The work I conducted at Dar Jacir will help frame theoretical interventions in my dissertation. I am working on the history of labour through the Mandate period. Specifically, I analyse how labour and labouring patterns were determined by colonisation and capital, or in opposition to these forces. While the writers in the magazines were not part of the typical working class, they spoke eloquently on such forces and the importance of the working class. They also considered what was to be done to either resist such structures for a liberated Palestine. As such, I want to use their productions to consider alternative possibilities and divergences to the hegemonic forces of capital and colonialism during this period.
