What can and cannot be said about Palestine? Who has "permission to narrate" the story of Palestine? In a new course sponsored by the Committee for Discourse Analysis at Birzeit University and taught by Dr. Toine van Teffelen of the University of Amsterdam, Birzeit students are exploring these and other questions through the theoretical approach and techniques developed in discourse analysis.

The University's Committee of Discourse Analysis plans to offer both credit and community outreach courses under a three year program of curriculum development and academic exchange sponsored by Medcampus, a wide-ranging project of the European Commission that links universities throughout the region.

Dr. Sharif Kanaaneh, the Chair of the Committee for Discourse Analysis, explained the background to the new program: "The Committee has its roots in our preparation for the "Discourse and Palestine" conference, co-sponsored by Birzeit and Amsterdam universities and held in the spring of 1992. Today, the Committee is an interdisciplinary group of faculty members, from linguistics, cultural studies, anthropology, English and Arabic, that will guide the three-year program of courses and other related activities, including writing manuals, collecting readings and developing visual materials."

Dr. Kanaaneh, an anthropologist whose own research focuses on Palestinian folklore and folk expression, stressed that discourse analysis is an approach that can be used in many fields, and thus an interdisciplinary team is appropriate. He envisons an eventual master's degree at Birzeit University in Communication and Discourse Analysis.

During the second semester, in addition to Dr. van Teffelen's course, Palestinian filmmaker Eli Suleiman offered a community outreach course in visual discourse. In November 1993, the Committee hosted a short course on discourse analysis given by Dr. Tuen Van Dijk of Amsterdam University.