The Politics of Occupied Pleasure, Tanya Habjouqa and Thembi Mutch, SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2016-05-31

https://www.soas.ac.uk/media-studies/
Please note there is some strong language on this recording.
This panel discussion titled "The Politics of Occupied Pleasure: Images of everyday resilience and affirmation in times of continuous violence" was held at the Centre for Media Studies, School of Arts and the Centre for Palestine Studies, SOAS University of London on 26 May 2016.

More about this event: https://goo.gl/Fm2svf

The Centre for Media Studies and the Centre for Palestine Studies are pleased to host a conversation between two SOAS alumni, Tanya Habjouqa and Thembi Mutch, to celebrate the launch of Habjouqa's highly-acclaimed photo/essay book Occupied Pleasures.

Bios of speakers:

Tanya Habjouqa is an award-winning photographer, journalist and educator. Her practice links social documentary, collaborative portraiture and participant observation, an approach to visual storytelling described as “new documentary”. Her principal interests include gender, representations of otherness, dispossession and human rights, with a particular concern for ever-shifting socio-political dynamics in the Middle East. Trained in journalism and anthropology with an MA in Global Media and emphasis on Middle East Politics from SOAS, Habjouqa produces in-depth narratives that offer nuanced alternatives to mainstream media depictions of her subjects. Her work often reflects a desire to trace common humanity. Based in East Jerusalem, Habjouqa is half-Texan, half-Jordanian, with Circassian ancestry, possessing a diverse background that is rich in narrative, folklore, black humour, and hospitality.
 
Habjouqa’s project Occupied Pleasures received support from the Magnum Foundation and achieved a World Press Photo award in 2014. Culminating in a namesake book by FotoEvidence, it was heralded by TIME magazine and the Smithsonian as one of the best photo books of 2015. Habjouqa’s work has been exhibited worldwide, including in She Who Tells a Story (MFA Boston), Here and Elsewhere (New Museum), Realism in Rawiya (Nottingham), and acquired for the collections of MFA Boston, Institut du Monde Arab, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. She is a founding member of Rawiya, the first all-female photography collective from the Middle East.

Dr Thembi Mutch (PhD, CMS/SOAS) is an award-winning journalist, writer, trainer and educator who splits her time between England and Tanzania, where she spent time carrying fieldwork for her PhD on women, modernity and media in Zanzibar. Thembi is interested in questions of trust, informal communities and interesting ways to survive despite daily hardships. Originally trained as a community youth worker in Whitechapel, she has combined journalism, reportage, documentary and collaborative ethnography to tell the stories of groups of people who get left on the margins of the mainstream or who are displaced. She is also interested in gender, land access and human rights with a particular focus on East and Southern Africa. Besides her doctorate in Media Studies which she completed at SOAS, she has training in journalism and anthropology at the London School of Economics and the University of Westminster.

Thembi has produced, reported and presented numerous features and long form documentaries for international media outlets, including The Rough Guide to South Africa, Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, Musical Migrants, Newsdesk as well as Farming Today and African Arts programme for the World Service radio programmes. She has published in the Financial Times, the Independent, The Guardian,  Diva, British Journalism Review, Think Africa, and The Telegraph. In 2006 as part of the True Vision TV company she was the researcher/producer on the Channel 4 programme “World Without Water” which won the Prince Rainier Award for Environmental Investigative journalism. Thembi is currently teaching occasional courses at Sussex University and is completing a literary thriller, called “The Motorbike in Lobatse” as well as several academic articles.