Toward a Politics of Echowitnessing: Gaza's Audiovisual Archive and Mediated Solidarity Movements

This thesis argues that Palestinian audiovisual self-documentation from Gaza constitutes a resistant archive in which sound functions as a crucial epistemology of survival, relation, and refusal. Against the overwhelming visuality through which Gaza is typically apprehended, it contends that Palestinian soundedness is not supplementary to the image but central to how life under siege is negotiated, witnessed, and asserted. Through qualitative analysis of audiovisual footage circulated on social media since October 2023, this thesis examines how image and sound together archive atrocity, sustain communal care, and mediate survivance. It further argues that the circulation of this archive helps generate mediated solidarity and counterpublic formation beyond the borders and limits of the nation-state, culminating in the Student Intifada as a political afterlife of Palestinian audiovisual echowitnessing.