Education and Palestine: Resisting and Reproducing Imperial/Colonial Epistemologies

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

The field of education has a crucial role to play in supporting students, educators, and policymakers in contextualizing the genocide in Gaza with histories and continuing impacts of occupation, apartheid, genocide, and political contestations. This symposium highlights papers that address education as spaces of settler-colonial reproduction and resistance. Grounded in a decolonial lens, these pieces represent an epistemology that honors Palestinian history and identity during a time when they face existential threat. By engaging with these papers, the symposium seeks to reimagine how educational systems could reckon with, rebuild, repair and remedy the impacts of occupation, genocide, and settler-colonial and imperial violence.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Decolonial, Postcolonial, and Anti-Colonial Studies in Education

Chair

• Catherine E. Pitcher, Harvard University

Papers

• "Knowledge In The Strongest Weapon": Palestinian Teachers of the Revolution in Lebanon - Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Barnard College; Jo Kelcey, Lebanese American University; Maria Abunnasr, Independent Scholar

• “Destroy the Schools, Erase a People”: Scholasticide as Settler-Colonial Praxis - Marc Lamont Hill, Graduate Center - CUNY

• Settler Universities: The Imbrication of Israeli Higher Education in Colonial Violence - Maya Wind, University of British Columbia

Discussant

• Thea Renda Abu El-Haj, Barnard College