Data Storytelling in Palestine Solidarity Work: Art and Activism for Countering Repression

Title: Data Storytelling in Palestine Solidarity Work: Art and Activism for Countering Repression In 2025/2026 Visualizing Palestine (VP) and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) are collaborating on an exhibition, “Why We Record: Defying Fragmentation and Erasure in Palestine” that is available globally to engage communities in learning about and advocating for Palestine, while also reclaiming public spaces in an attempt to push back against the silencing of dissent. The exhibition includes photographs, stories, and data-led visuals/ infographics and is divided into three themes of the Palestinian experience: displacement, fragmentation, and return/ future visioning. The exhibition is available to download for free and has been shown in Washington D.C., Thailand, Oregon, and Minnesota, among other locations. For the purposes of the ‘Intergalactic’ Conference on Resistance Studies, the exhibit could be installed on the UMass Amherst campus or shared digitally during the panel. Panelists will discuss their work in creating and touring this new exhibition, including with Palestinian contributors to the exhibit. Attendees can expect to learn more about the process of curating an art exhibition about Palestine, the importance of including art and other visual material in teaching and learning spaces, and the repression that artist activists and their work face. As storytelling, education, and advocacy organizations, visual arts are critical to the work of VP and AFSC in their work for justice against colonialism. Panelists will expand on the intrinsic ties between art and activism for Palestine and the potential effectiveness of art to increase and maintain resistance under increasingly repressive conditions. The panel will be hybrid (in person and online) to accommodate contributors who are not in the U.S. Visualizing Palestine uses data and research to visually communicate Palestinian experiences to provoke narrative change. We envision a liberated future for Palestinians in a world free from oppression. We have produced over 300 research-based visual communication resources over the last 13 years, serving the Palestinian liberation movement, educators, journalists, students, and others with accurate, compelling, accessible, and visually urgent information about Palestinian reality and narratives. In 2024, we published our first book, Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation. American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) works for a just, peaceful, and sustainable world free of violence, inequality, and oppression. We join with people and partners worldwide to meet urgent community needs, challenge injustice, and build peace. Since 1948, the organization has worked in the United States, Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territory with Palestinians, Israelis, and other committed activists to support nonviolence, challenge oppression, and end Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism, and military occupation of Palestine. This work is guided by our values and principles that support the implementation of international human rights and humanitarian law, including the implementation of refugees' right of return. The organization has produced two recent books on Gaza, Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire (2022) and Displaced in Gaza: Stories from the Gaza Genocide (2025).