By taking students out of their comfort zone, field-based courses—which are increasingly popular in secondary and postsecondary education—have the potential to be deep, transformative learning experiences. But what happens when the field in question is a site of active or recent conflict? In Conflict Zone, Comfort Zone, editors Agnieszka Paczyńska and Susan F. Hirsch highlight new approaches to field-based learning in conflict zones worldwide. As the contributors demonstrate, instructors must leave the comfort zone of traditional pedagogy to meet the challenges of field-based education.

Drawing on case studies in the United States and abroad, the contributors address the ethical considerations of learning in conflict zones, evaluate the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching these courses, and provide guidelines for effecting change. They also explore how the challenges of field-based classes are magnified in conflict and postconflict settings, and outline the dilemmas faced by those seeking to resolve those challenges. Finally, filling a crucial gap in existing literature, the contributors identify best practices that will assist aspiring instructors in developing successful field-based courses in conflict zones.

Contributors: Daniel R. Brunstetter, Alison Castel, Gina M. Cerasani, Alexander Cromwell, Maryam Z. Deloffre, Sandi DiMola, Leslie Dwyer, Eric Hartman, Pushpa Iyer, Allyson M. Lowe, Patricia A. Maulden, rj nickels, Anthony C. Ogden, Jennifer M. Ramos, Lisa E. Shaw, Daniel Wehrenfennig

In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artists' creation of new ways of seeing—such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists' exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness —offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israel's militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.