Reading the power of spaces: Palestinian Israeli women at the Hebrew University

Our ethnographic study of Palestinian Israeli women at the Hebrew University explores how these women construct space into place as they construct themselves. Tracing the women's experiences in the dormitories, Jerusalem, and Israel/Palestine, we show how the women acquire knowledge of the gendered and national organization of space and develop practices for using this knowledge to negotiate power relations. Using an analytical understanding of space as constituted of and by social relations, we expand on the work on space as text done by Lefebvre, de Certeau, and Moore. We show that it is the power to read places, or spatial literacy, which allows women and marginal groups to contest dominant power regimes.