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“I learned that academia could be a shared path” – 5in10 with Ido Fuchs

Ido Fuchs is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program for Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. He is also an Associated EUME Doctoral Fellow for the academic year 2024/2025 at the Forum Transregionale Studien and a Visiting Scholar at the Utrecht University Network for Environmental Humanities for Spring 2025. His project, Writing Returns, studies the poetics of return in Palestinian literature, focusing on questions of gender, anti/post-colonialism, and world literature. His second project, tentatively titled The Atmosphere of Doomsday, brings together research on colonialism, violence, apocalyptic discourses, and contemporary cultural production in Palestine/Israel. His works, deriving from both projects, have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Interventions, Biography, Theoretical Practice, Mafte’akh, and Bezalel. The audio recording of his EUME Berliner Seminar titled ‘Writing Returns: The Poetics of Return in Palestinian Literaturehas recently be published and can be listened to here.

Ido Fuchs. Photo: Private.

1. How would you explain your research to someone who is not an expert?

My doctoral dissertation studies the poetics of return in Palestinian literature. Essentially, I ask: What is return in Palestinian literary texts, how is it articulated, and what are its potentialities?

The question of return as a Palestinian core issue is rooted in the 1948 Palestinian Nakba and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians by Israel. However, the displacement of Palestinians is not a singular event but rather a continuous reality due to the persistence of Israel to prevent the return of Palestinian refugees and its continuous territorial expansion accompanied by ethnic cleansing. Thus, the question of the Palestinian return remains as acute as it was in 1948 (if not even more acute).

Yet, while we can find extensive legal, political, sociological, and humanitarian literature on the Palestinian return, its feasibility, and the applicability of certain international treaties, there is still a need to understand the myriad ways in which Palestinians perceive and formulate return. My research takes a literary approach, aiming to provide a new and nuanced understanding of the meanings and implications of the figure of return in Palestinian cultural production.

Accordingly, the research seeks to discuss critical differences – linguistic, territorial, historical, political, gendered, and more – in the articulations of return in Palestinian literature. To do so, I apply critical and comparative methodology on a diverse corpus that includes texts that differ in their author, genre, geographical location, period, and language – Arabic, Hebrew, and English.

Nevertheless, these critical differences do not point to a deterministic fragmentation. On the contrary, I insist, they reveal the radical potentiality of the poetics of return. As I demonstrate throughout the project, return unfolds as a poetic figure that can express and form radical linguistic, social, and political possibilities. As such a figure, it may offer us a prism that simultaneously connects and holds critical differences – through which we can think of Palestinian communities and culture and beyond.

2. What intrigued you when you started your academic journey?

Initially, I went to university in order to study the Chinese language. I was required to take courses outside the Department of East Asian Studies, so I picked some from the Literature Department although, until then, I didn’t read much. I quickly became mesmerized by literature – from the classics through modern poetry to postmodernist genres. It was also the encounter with Literary Theory that left me astonished, introducing me to ways of thinking that I had never experienced before. However, above all, it was the scene in the classroom, the lively discussions, and the great teachers I had (and still have) that made me continue my literary studies. And while my perspectives on academia and literature may shift from time to time, much of its initial charm stays with me along my academic path and signals me the way forward.

I believe that part of the critical thinking I learned during these first years also led me to research Palestinian literature. Due to the typical Israeli education I received, I was not very familiar with Palestinian literature or with Palestinian culture and history in general. However, as I began reading Palestinian literature during my MA studies – first in English and Hebrew, and later in Arabic too – I was exposed to a whole realm of knowledge and experiences that were violently silenced in much of the space of Palestine/Israel and worldwide. I also learned that beyond comprising outstanding texts, this literature and its research field offer an essential critique of oppressive systems while presenting radical alternatives. Coming to understand that I am heavily linked to, and even complicit in, these oppressive systems made it all the more important to me to learn about the Palestinian experience and possible alternatives for our violent reality.

3. What were formative encounters or challenges?

Writing my MA thesis was quite challenging, especially during the days of the pandemic. It was an educational experience, but after submitting the thesis, I was not sure I would continue my studies. Nevertheless, my supervisor, Galili Shahar, very perceptively introduced me to three PhD students. We bonded swiftly, as we were all intrigued by questions of language, knowledge, and power structures, especially with regard to knowledge production in Palestine/Israel. We founded a project, the Arabic-Hebrew Lexicon, centered around dual-lingual and multi-vocal conceptualizations of keywords. What was unique about our work was not only its outcome but also the process itself: co-research and co-writing that embrace conversations in different languages and places, as well as diverse perspectives.  

This experience was pivotal for me. Not only did I gain new knowledge in Hebrew and Arabic, and the four of us remained friends who still play a role in each other’s lives, but I also learned that academia could be a shared path. Following this experience, I believe (and try to act accordingly) that this is what academia should be: a place for conversation, producing shared knowledge, and—most importantly—a place for communities.

4. What do you consider to be the role of the humanities and social sciences in times of upheaval, fragmented publics, and authoritarian transgressions?

Realistically, I do not consider the humanities and social sciences to automatically have an intrinsic moral core or aspirations – especially as institutions of capitalist, imperial, colonial, and other violent systems. That being said, I reckon that there are actions, methodologies, and research that can be done within the humanities and social sciences to resist this violence, as more than a few scholars demonstrate. I can think of the late Walid Daqqa and Anat Matar’s work – together and separately, within academia and the Israeli prison system and across their borders. I can also think of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s groundbreaking research that not only presents insightful investigations into the systematic oppression of Palestinians and its relation to knowledge production but also depicts brave alternatives to the oppressive reality – both in the research’s objectives and methodologies. In this manner, to me, what is important is not necessarily studying contemporary political issues. Rather, it is questioning the boundaries of knowledge, academia, and the political space.

5. What book, article, film, exhibition or song would you recommend, and why?                            

I highly recommend reading anything by the great Palestinian author Sahar Khalifeh, especially her 1980 novel The Sunflower (عباد الشمس). This polyphonic novel is undoubtedly a 20th-century masterpiece that tackles the intersection of coloniality, class, and gender in Palestine/Israel. It has a great plot, fantastic writing, and unforgettable scenes (unfortunately, it was not translated into English as far as I know).

In the realm of academic texts, I want to recommend Sayak Valencia’s Gore Capitalism (Capitalismo Gore). This is by no means an easy read. Nevertheless, it offers a crucial analysis of and for our violent times. Valencia presents a breakdown of the commodification of violence in different levels of g-local markets, applying decolonial and feminist thinking. While her thesis may be debated, her innovative scholarly approach surely illustrates the sort of radical theory that is essential for us today.


Citation: “I learned that academia could be a shared path” – 5in10 with Ido Fuchs, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 27.03.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/55970


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (March 27, 2025). “I learned that academia could be a shared path” – 5in10 with Ido Fuchs. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved April 20, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13kxj


Forum Transregionale Studien

The Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien promotes the internationalization of research in the humanities and social sciences. It provides scope for collaboration among researchers with different regional and disciplinary perspectives and appoints researchers from all over the world as Fellows. More...

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