Son[i]a #462
Mariam Barghouti
![Son[i]a #462](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Mariam_Barghouti_350_235.jpg)
Mariam Barghouti is a Palestinian-American writer, journalist, and researcher based in Ramallah. Her trajectory moves from student activism at Birzeit University to graduate studies in sociology and global change at the University of Edinburgh, where she specialized in the discourses and mechanisms that legitimize state violence. From there, she went on to spend more than a decade reporting from the frontlines of Palestinian life.
Barghouti writes from the inside out, not as an outside observer parachuted into crisis, but as someone for whom the political is inseparable from the personal and the everyday. As a founding editor of Communicating Palestine, a platform dedicated to building ethical narratives about Palestinian life under occupation, she has documented Israeli military operations, settler violence, the targeting of journalists, and the slow violence of occupation that rarely makes headlines. Her writing refuses the false neutrality often demanded of Palestinian voices and insists on naming colonialism for what it is. At the same time, it challenges a world that permits Palestinians to speak only as witnesses to suffering, not as experts on their own reality.
In this podcast, Mariam Barghouti talks about the double labor of journalism when you are both its practitioner and its subject: the negotiations with editors, the hierarchy of credibility in international newsrooms, and what gets lost when the only legible Palestinian is the suffering one. As she argues, “before the bombs are dropped people are killed with language”. So we spend time dissecting seven systemic levers of narrative that sustain the manufacturing of consent and danger, that make Palestinian life either hypervisible as tragedy or invisible as politics. And we return, again and again, to a conviction that runs through all her work: Palestinians are not victims waiting to be documented. Palestinians are a people in struggle, determined to remain.
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