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Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s worldview was shaped by the complexities of her experience of growing up and rejecting Israeli citizenship and the ‘settler colonial identity’ that she had been assigned. Now, as a writer, art curator and professor of comparative literature and modern culture and media at Brown University, she works to reframe the past to challenge concepts of knowledge, art, history and human rights as they’ve been framed by imperialism. Made on the occasion of her being awarded the International Center of Photography’s 2023 Infinity Award for Critical Writing, Research and Theory, in this video Azoulay draws from her writings to argue for the collective imperative to ‘unlearn’ the omnipresent colonial constructs that surround us. In particular, she focuses on the need to view photographs as part of ongoing conflicts and questions that can still be grappled with today, rather than just past documentation of an inevitable, settled present and future.
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Philosophy of mind
‘Am I not at least something?’ A surreal dive into Descartes’s Meditations
3 minutes
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Illness and disease
Humanity eradicated smallpox 45 years ago. It’s a story worth remembering
25 minutes
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Art
When East met West in the images of an overlooked, original photographer
9 minutes
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War and peace
Two Ukrainian boys’ summer unfolds just miles from the frontlines
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Ethics
Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?
5 minutes
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Archaeology
What’s an ancient Greek brick doing in a Sumerian city? An archeological investigation
16 minutes
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Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
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History
From Afghanistan to Virginia – the Muslims who fought in the American Civil War
22 minutes
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War and peace
A frontline soldier’s moving account of the fabled ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914
12 minutes