An assemblage of affective sounds: resistance and power through the Palestinian electronic music scene

This thesis is an exploratory, descriptive, conceptual research about the Palestinian electronic dance scene. First, it sets out to make sense of social relations and elements traversing and constituting this space, locating the scene chronologically, geographically and affectively through anecdotes, interviews and encounters in different dance floors and spaces. It explores how music, affect, class and space are bound together to produce a layered and mobile assemblage of people that relate in diverse ways to the practice of resistance.

Second, this project focuses on the meanings and practices related to resistance within the scene. Departing from a critical standpoint on subcultural theory and traditional frameworks for resistance, I interrogate and amplify the meanings of resisting in this context. The idea of ‘generative resistance’ is articulated in this process and examined in terms of its production of new spaces, communities, affects, intimacies, alternatives and culture, disputing diverse power structures.

This thesis uses a participant and feminist micro-ethnography. Developed between 2019- 2022, the methods employed are mainly participant and sensory observation, interviews and informal conversations, and online analysis. I conducted fieldwork in Ramallah (Palestine), Amman (Jordan), Berlin (Germany), Athens (Greece) and London (Britain). Through this process, I developed a critical ‘anti-research’ epistemology that questions my positionality and generates an ‘affective’ epistemology: a way of doing research and producing knowledge that is based on difference, discomfort, solidarity and transformation.