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Settler Universities: The Imbrication of Israeli Higher Education in Colonial Violence

Sun, April 27, 9:50 to 11:20am MDT (9:50 to 11:20am MDT), The Colorado Convention Center, Floor: Meeting Room Level, Room 709

Abstract

Indigenous and other scholars of education have long interrogated universities as infrastructure that sustains settler-colonial violence, from campuses as vehicles for land expropriation, through the cultivation of colonial epistemologies to the erasure of Indigenous identities, languages and knowledge systems (Tuck and Yang 2012; Bhambra 2018; Mzileni and Mkhize 2019; Harvey 2021; Tuhiwai Smith 2019; Stein 2022). Palestinian scholars of education have shown the ways in which the Israeli state systematically targets and suppresses Palestinian knowledge production and pedagogy, both within Israeli territory and in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Sa’di 2013; Kuttab 2019; Barakami 2010), what Karma Nabulsi has called “scholasticide” (2009).

My paper shows how Israeli higher education institutions have been enlisted by Israel’s settler-colonial project. I argue that Israeli universities are settler universities, institutions which reproduce Israeli society as a settler society and participate in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. From tailored degree programs honing the work of the military and secret police, through laboratories developing weapons and technologies used to enforce illegal occupation, to dominant paradigms in academic disciplines subordinating their research agendas to service military rule, Israeli academic institutions are imbricated with the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. The paper will reflect on the reproduction of colonial violence through the institution of the university, and how faculty, staff, and students are mobilizing to interrupt this reproduction and work towards the decolonization of higher education.

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