Palestinian Stories
Palestinian Stories for Family Archives and Research is an Egyptian/Palestinian initiative, which aims to democratize the writing of Palestinian history by encouraging everyone to tell their story and build their personal and familial archive.
We aim to preserve and document Social, cultural and economic memories of Palestinian families who lived in Palestine before the occupation, through communicating and networking with third generation Palestinians in Palestine and the diaspora, in order to create a digital, interactive archive as well as an online platform.
Preserving memory and narrative, the platform becomes a humanitarian museum for Palestinians, and the archive within a primary source for researchers.
Testimonies from Gaza, end of October 2023 - Ongoing
When the 7th of October war in Gaza started, it became clear how urgently a documentation and archiving system is needed; due to the conflicting -almost comically different- accounts of various media outlets covering the war around the world.
It became a goal for Palestinian Stories to document the voice of ordinary people in Gaza adopting the "History From Below" approach; through documenting and archiving their personal accounts on social media.
I started volunteering with Palestinian Stories late October 2023 and helped create a system that documents and archives the different social media forms (texts, images, videos and obituaries) posted by Palestinians trapped in Gaza. My main focus then was on documenting obituaries in particular.
In February 2024, I started officially working as a documentation officer at Palestinian Stories and supervised the work of 12+ students from the History department in the American University in Cairo (AUC), my duties included:
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assign them weekly posts to document.
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track their submission curve
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prevent/resolve any duplication incidents
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review their work
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give them individual feedback
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write weekly and end-of-term performance reports
After that partnership ended in 15/05/2024, I became Documentation Manager at Palestinian Stories where I give sessions to new volunteers explaining and showcasing the process of the documentation and archiving system. I also supervise different volunteer teams, ranging from 5 to 10 members, in their work to document and archive the narrative provided by everyday life Palestinians.
On different occasions, I co-present with the initiative founder and CEO Samar Dwedar, in events to talk about Palestinian Stories and our work. An example of such events was the one at the invitation of Dr. Hanan Sabaa, Head of the Anthropology Department at the AUC, with students of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences Fellowship.
You can check the official website for archiving family history at Palestinian Stories here.
