Palestine Liberation in and against Higher Education, roundtable #2 of 2 (HYBRID)

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

Palestine Liberation in and against Higher Education
A proposed roundtable, one of two, at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, November 2025, in San Juan, Puerto Rico
We aim to situate pro-Palestinian struggles on the terrain of higher education within abolitionist, decolonial frameworks and in ways that unsettle conventional notions of margins and centers. Against myths of an ivory tower, we ask how universities are co-constituted with various forms of violence, as seen, for example, in the repression of movements calling for universities to cut their ties with Israel’s genocide of Palestinian people. We are particularly interested in approaches to activist praxis in American Studies that break from conventional modes of knowledge production within the academy.
This roundtable will consider"
-Responses to the ongoing scholasticide of academics, students, and staff in Gazan universities and attacks upon higher education in the West Bank, with the complicity and active participation of Israeli universities;
-Pro-Palestinian encampments as sites for alternative forms of knowledge production;
-Critical analyses and organizing around universities’ ties to Israeli institutions;
-Learning from failures and successes in movements for boycott and divestment;
-Explorations of primitive accumulation and colonialism as ongoing processes, across sites and geographies (e.g., Puerto Rico, Palestine);
-Black and Indigenous movements in solidarity with Palestinian liberation, linking local and transnational movements to abolish racial-colonial capitalism and for Indigenous resurgences;
-Responding to Zionists’ appropriation of the rhetoric of indigeneity, conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and right-wing attacks on settler-colonial studies, Critical Race Theory, and DEI;
-Mapping organized networks of repression of Palestine solidarity, and building counter-networks to resist repression and act in solidarity across industries, sectors, and institutional levels and divisions (e.g., K-12, higher ed, culture industries);
-The limits and possibilities of appeals to academic freedom for defenses against repression;
-Relations of university and border securitization with the IDF, policing, incarceration, labor regimes, and weapons development in Israel;
-Networks of displacement that include Palestine, Indigenous ghettoization in the Americas, and gentrification, among others;
-Connections between state policies and university policies of repression, policing, militarization, and finances;Challenging academics’ quiescence in the face of genocide and disavowal of their implications in colonial, imperial infrastructures.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Lucien Baskin, CUNY Graduate Center

Panelists

• Laura Goldblatt, University of Virginia

• Nandini Sikand, Lafayette College

• Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, University of British Columbia

• Nick Mitchell, University of California-Santa Cruz

• Zachary Schwartz-Weinstein

Biographical Information

Lucien Baskin is a student in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center researching abolition, social movements, and the university. They are writing a dissertation on organizing at CUNY, as well as collaborative projects on radical education. They serve as co-chair of the ASA Critical Prison Studies Caucus, are a Freedom and Justice Insitute fellow, and work on Conversations in Black Freedom Studies at the Schomburg Center. Lucien organizes with CUNY for Palestine and is a strike-ready member of the PSC.

Laura Goldblatt is an assistant professor in the Global Studies program and Engagements curriculum at the University of Virginia. She is a scholar of state propaganda in the 20th-century U.S. and of anti-racist interventions in higher education, especially in response to the physical and financial securitization of public universities’ campuses. Along with her colleague Richard Handler, she is the author of The American Stamp: Postal Iconography, Democratic Citizenship and Consumerism in the United States (Columbia University Press, 2023). Her articles and essays have appeared in journals including Social Text, Modern American History, the Journal of Anthropological Research, Amerikastudien, and Winterthur Portfolio.

Nandini Sikand (they, she) is an anthropologist, filmmaker, dancer-choreographer. They are the author of Languid Bodies, Grounded Stances: The Curving Pathway of Neoclassical Odissi Dance (Berghahn Books, 2017) and they have written for Camera Obscura, Review of Middle East Studies, Journal of Film and Video, Prison Journalism Project, Fotograf, Visual Anthropology Review, Anthropology News and Dance Research Journal. Their award-winning films about the prison industrial complex, immigration, nationalism, sex work, breast cancer, and counter-culture music have screened worldwide and their work has been supported by The Guggenheim Foundation (2018), American Association of University Women (2013-14), The Jerome Foundation (1998), the Center for Asian American Media (2010) and New York State Council on the Arts (2010 and 2001) grant. They are the co-founder/director of Sakshi Productions, a neo-classical and contemporary dance company, and the Associate Director/Choreographer for Harmattan, an environmental performance group.
Sikand is a Professor of Film and Media Studies at an interdisciplinary program at Lafayette College, PA. They are currently working on several projects; a monograph titled Visualizing the Thug(gee): Colonialism, Race and Criminality, a collection of essays about parenting while brown and a film about the fragility of the dancing body. As a certified yoga instructor, they teach at Northampton County Prison where they also offer college-level courses.

Dr. Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe) is an Indigenous geographer whose work focuses on the relationship between climate change and Indigenous cultural/political land-based resurgence. Dr. Smiles is an adjunct professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability, at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Smiles serves as the Director of the Geographic Indigenous Futures Collaboratory, a community-based research group which works with Indigenous communities on place/space based research. Dr. Smiles has published widely in top journals, including Dialogues in Human Geography, Society and Natural Resources, and ACME. Besides their academic work, Dr. Smiles serves in leadership roles in the American Association of Geographers, the Canadian Association of Geographers, and serves their nation as a Trustee of Leech Lake Tribal College.

Maura Finkelstein is a writer, ethnographer, and associate professor of anthropology. She is the author of The Archive of Loss: Lively Ruination in Mill Land Mumbai, published by Duke University Press in 2019. Her writing has also been published in Anthropological Quarterly, City and Society, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology Now, Post45, Electric Literature, Allegra Lab, Red Pepper Magazine, The Markaz Review, the Scottish Left Review, Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, and Al Jazeera. She has been nominated for a Pushcart (2021), was a finalist for the Witness literary award (2022), was a Tin House Scholar (2023), and was recently the recipient of the 2024 New Directions Award from the General Anthropology Division (GAD) of the American Anthropological Association and the 2024 Courageous Voices Fellowship from the Scholars for Social Justice Executive Committee and the Advisory Committee for the Freedom and Justice Institute.

Nick Mitchell is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research and teaching explore the social arrangements of knowledge and the ways that knowledge and its institutional practices arrange social worlds. She is currently at work on two books. The first, Discipline and Surplus: Black Studies, Women's Studies, and the Dawn of Neoliberalism (under contract, Duke University Press), places the institutional projects of black studies and women’s studies not at the margins but the heart of the consolidation of the post-Civil Rights U.S. university. The second book, The University, in Theory: Essays on Institutional Knowledge, grows out of conversations that have developed in recent years in the field of critical university studies. As the field continues to consolidate its presence in universities through special issues in scholarly journals, new book series, and other forums, those of us who work in it increasingly encounter the injunction to theorize the university—that is, to assemble a coherent explanatory body of knowledge that reflects a general grasp of what the university is, what it does, and why. “The University, in Theory” seeks to interrupt this demand for theory by posing a different question: What if we looked at theory not as a tool that offers explanations to us about what the university is, but as a complex form of evidence produced by the university itself?

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein is Site Director for Woodbourne for Bard Prison Initiative. He writes histories of university labor. His book in progress is titled “Our People Will Survive and Fight This God-Damned University: Service Workers and the University-Hospital City, 1964-1980. He is a coauthor, with Abbie Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, and Nick Mitchell, of several essays on Abolitionist University Studies.