Rebecca L. Stein

This talk focuses on Israeli efforts to repudiate state violence against Palestinians by means of an accusation of fraudulence (“fake news!”). The claim has a long history in the Israeli context and in colonial contexts more generally. Dr. Stein focuses on how this now ubiquitous global charge of fakery, with its very long colonial history, is being mobilized by Israeli state officials and right-wing publics to perform an important kind political work: to disavow Palestinian victims and Israeli perpetrators. Or such is the hope.

Panel organizer

Invited Lectures ; Rebecca Stein

Invited Lectures ; Rebecca L. Stein

Papers Refereed

Papers Refereed

Papers Refereed

Papers Refereed

I have served for a decade

Member of the hiring committee for the Vice Provost for Finance and Administration

Member, Promotion Committee, Adam Rosenblatt

Chair of Harris Solomon Promotion committee

APC committee member

Curriculum Innovations ; In the fall of 2013, I taught a new course entitled "Anthropology of Media." This graduate seminar tracks some of the central themes, arguments, and debates within contemporary anthropological scholarship on media culture. The anthropological understanding of media – and the very notion of which media are worthy of scholarly engagement – has shifted dramatically over the last few decades. Our work in this seminar focuses on the most recent and influential of such interventions, with attention to the new ways that media scholars in the discipline are addressing questions of visual culture and visuality, cultures of sound, agency and the subject, violence and human rights, politics and history. Along the way, we will be particularly attentive to anthropology’s relationship to the growing fields of visual studies, sound studies, digital and new media studies. The bulk of our work will be focused on ethnographic engagements with media of varying kinds with attention to the highly variable ways that anthropologists have grappled with questions of medium, meditation and circulation through their fieldwork. This course will place questions of scholarly professionalization at the forefront of our collective work. In addition to developing a critical theoretical toolbox that might be employed in their own scholarship, students will be asked to read with an eye to scholars’ formal approach to matters of argumentation, citation, and ethnographic narrative and the ways that varying scholars approach questions of disciplinary methodology and epistemology (e.g. how they frame and delimit their objects of analysis, how they navigate the interplay between anthropological and interdisciplinary methodologies and theories, etc.). To further the ends of professional development, students will be asked write a research paper that mimics a publishable journal manuscript -- that is, one that both employs a portion of the theory studied together, but also produced in compliance with the protocols of a particular journal (its preferred argumentative structure, literature review, citational style and politics, etc).

Curriculum Innovations ; In the spring of 2012, I designed and taught a new course entitled, "Cultures of New Media" -- a course that stems from my current research on the linkages between digital media and political culture in the Israel/Palestine context. This advanced undergraduate seminar tracked a long history of new media beginning in the late 19th and early 20th century (with a focus on the camera, the radio, and cinema) -- and progressed towards the more recent new media that have developed in the digital age. This class took an interdisciplinary approach, combining readings from Anthropology, Sociology, Science and Technologies Studies, Communications, and Critical Theory. The course culminated with a research paper which invited students to employ the theoretical tool box we have studied with a contemporary case study of their choosing.

Curriculum Innovations ; In the fall of 2010, I redesigned the departmental undergraduate requirement, "Theoretical Foundations." In my course, I sought to introduce advanced undergraduates to some of the key theoretical literatures and debates on which contemporary scholarship in Cultural Anthropology relies. While our work was an attempt to understand the theoretical tenets of the field, it was not bound by its disciplinary limits. Rather, we read widely in social and cultural theory, studying those texts, theorists, and theoretical paradigms that have had the most impact on contemporary scholarship. Our course was divided into two parts. Part One focused solely on foundational theoretical texts from the last century, endeavoring to understand their central arguments and the texts with which they are in conversation. Part Two considered the interface between theory and ethnography of the last two decades, focusing on a set of topics that have been particularly important within the field (e.g. the critique of human rights; medical anthropology; critical studies of science, technology, and media; etc.). Our readings were complemented by collaborative, in class analyses of primary texts (e.g. documentary films, human rights documents, etc.) which exercised student skills in bringing theory to bear on real world contexts. The course aimed to consider the ways that theory is employed in this work to make sense of the daily practices, social formations, and populations that anthropologists study.