He thought they were alone on the road. The car’s feeble headlights cut through the surrounding black as it approached the small Palestinian village where he would spend the night.

It was 2003 when Dr. Phillip Hammack, currently an associate psychology professor at UCSC, traveled through Israel and the West Bank, conducting field research for his dissertation. Hammack’s research, which would later inspire his book “Narrative and the Politics of Identity,” relied on interviewing 45 Israeli and Palestinian adolescents scattered throughout the region.