Learning With/From Sites of Empire and Settler Colonialism: Palestine, Iran, and Knowledge Production Across the Transatlantic Global North

Group Submission Type: Special Session

Description of Session

The Middle East has long been a laboratory for US politics of empire, civilizational conflict, and settler colonialism. From the 1953 coup in Iran co-orchestrated by the Central Intelligence Agency, to the seven decade-long support of Israel as it occupies Palestinian land in violation of international and humanitarian law, to the post 9-11 “War on Terror,” the US has sought to determine the geopolitics of the region through coercive mechanisms.
Confronting these crises requires more than historical accounting—it calls for an educational response. This roundtable has two aims: first, to examine the legacies and contemporary crises caused by these efforts, with Iran and Palestine as key reference points; second, to articulate possibilities and modes of educational praxis with the potential to interrupt the legitimation and (re)production of empire and settler colonialism. These aims emerge in response to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, and joint Israeli and US preemptive attacks on Iran in June 2025.
Following a joint Palestinian military operation staged on October 7, 2023, Israel has pursued widespread civilian violence and destruction of infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank. In Gaza, atrocities have included the bombing of hospitals, schools, universities, and libraries—increasingly referred to as scholasticide (Dader et al, 2024)—and the killing of children, doctors, journalists, and aid workers, alongside refusal of humanitarian aid as a technique of war/genocide (Hall, 2025). While civilian deaths since October 7 are estimated to constitute 90% of the confirmed 61,944 deaths (Al Jazeera, 2025), the Israeli government has refused global calls for a ceasefire, vowing instead to seize total control of Gaza (Baldwin, 2025). These policies have been enabled by both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, though bipartisan US support for Israeli occupation and violence has a long history (Said, 1979; Erakat, 2019; Khalidi, 2020).
This bipartisan support for Israel is paired with an equally bipartisan commitment to “containing” Iran, encompassing military, economic, and political mechanisms to pressure its government into policies amenable to US goals. Key among these is dismantling Iran’s nuclear program, despite its right to civilian nuclear power as enshrined in the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Since the 1979 Revolution, Iran has endured nearly five decades of US sanctions targeting its economy, political elite, and military. Sanctions have been theorized as “an economic weapon,” or war by other means (Mulder, 2022), yet their effects remain underexamined in comparative and international education research. Resembling scholasticide in Palestine, sanctions constitute a slower form of epistemic warfare in Iran: denying students opportunities to study abroad, blocking researchers from collaborations, and preventing universities from acquiring essential equipment. While sanctions have been the dominant form of US engagement with Iran, in June 2025 Israel launched an unprovoked attack, later joined by the US. Opposition to these preemptive strikes was muted, when voiced at all. These non-responses must be historicized—not as relics of the past but as evidence that the United States is a settler-colonial empire, reproduced through the very structures it exports abroad to consolidate power.
This session revisits these events to contribute to longstanding discussions about the role of educators, curricula, and institutions in creating alternatives to colonial and imperialist practices that sustain and normalize the death of marginalized populations in the name of others’ safety. Together with our speakers, we propose to explore:
● How is education in the US, and more broadly the Transatlantic Global North, implicated in sustaining, normalizing, invisibilizing US imperialism, as it materializes in Palestine, Iran, and the broader “Middle East?”

● How can we think about Iran and Palestine as sites of shared imperial phenomena, while also attending to their distinctiveness?

● How is critical political awareness possible/precluded in US/Transatlantic educational settings? How does context shape what is possible to learn/know/enact?

● Despite organizing against genocide and occupation, legal and administrative constraints in educational spaces remain formidable. How, then, do we unlearn/teach towards a decolonial, anti-imperialist future?

● What is the role of educators in challenging official narratives within politically hostile spaces? How does this moment echo/depart from past wars? What forms of action, mutual aid, inquiry, and pedagogy are needed for the present and for a just future?
This session contributes to scholarship and activist conversations by foregrounding the educational dimensions of US empire, maintained by settler colonial processes (Wolfe, 2006), in the Middle East and their consequences for Palestine, Iran, and beyond. By bringing historical analysis into dialogue with contemporary crises, it highlights how education both sustains and can interrupt the reproduction of imperial violence. The discussion will be especially relevant to educators, researchers, and students concerned with decolonial praxis, as well as activists seeking to connect educational work to struggles for justice in Palestine, Iran, and other sites shaped by US intervention.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Roozbeh Shirazi, University of Minnesota

Presenters

• Nikoo Nikoonazari, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Zeena Zakharia, University of Maryland College Park

• Maria Hantzopoulos, Vassar College

• Taher Herzallah, American Muslims for Palestine

• Hanadi Shatara, California State University Sacramento

• Roozbeh Shirazi, University of Minnesota