Palestine Liberation in and against Higher Education - Roundtable #1 of 2 (HYBRID)

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

For this roundtable discussion about pro-Palestinian struggles on the terrain of higher education, we aim to situate these struggles 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. Potential topics could include:
- 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;
- Among many other topics.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Vineeta Singh, Virginia Commonwealth University

Panelists

• Maya Wind, University of California Riverside

• Abigail Boggs, Wesleyan University

• Jairo Isaac Fúnez-Flores, Texas Tech University

• Brooke Lober, University of California-Berkeley

• Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed, CUNY Graduate Center

Virtual Accommodation Panelist

• Sanaz Raji, Northumbria University

Comment

• Eli L Meyerhoff, Duke University

Biographical Information

Vineeta Singh (chair)
Vineeta Singh is an Assistant Teaching Professor and Associate Director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Her teaching and research are grounded in abolitionist and critical university studies. Her current research projects focus on the history of student protest through theoretical and methodlogical frameworks borrowed from the emergent formations of surveillance studies and future studies.

Maya Wind
Maya Wind is a President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Riverside. Her scholarship explores how settler societies and global systems of militarism and policing are sustained, with a particular focus on the reproduction and export of Israeli security expertise. Her first book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso 2024), investigates the complicity of Israeli universities in settler colonialism and apartheid, and her writing on the imbrication of the university with violence have appeared in public and academic journals including Cultural Anthropology and South Atlantic Quarterly.

Sanaz Raji & Unis Resist Border Controls (URBC)
Sanaz Raji is an Independent Social Research Foundation fellow at Northumbria University, in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK. Her research explores the nexus between border controls through the Hostile Environment policy and marketized higher education in UK universities. Sanaz is the founder of Unis Resist Border Controls (URBC), a national campaign launched in March 2016 that works to end the Hostile Environment policy and border controls in UK higher education. Her writings have been featured in The Guardian, Times Higher Education, Red Pepper Magazine, and Wonkhe in addition to academic journals and edited books.

Abbie Boggs
Abigail Boggs teaches in the sociology department, college of education studies, and the feminist, gender, and sexuality studies program at Wesleyan University. She is currently revising her first book, “Empire’s Demographic Levers: U.S. Universites, Immigration Law, and Noncitizen Students.” Her scholarly work can be found in Feminist Studies, Abolition Journal, American Quarterly, S&F Online, The Journal of Academic Freedom, History of the Present, and the edited collection Mobile Desires: The Politics and Erotics of Mobility Justice.

Jairo Fúnez-Flores
Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies at Texas Tech University. He is the Program Chair of the Decolonial, Postcolonial, and Anti-Colonial Studies in Education SIG for the American Educational Research Association. His research is situated at the intersection of sociocultural studies in curriculum theory, decolonial theory, critical ethnography, and social movement research. Currently, he is working on a book titled Insurgent Decoloniality that situates decolonial thought in sites of struggle. He has published articles in Theory, Culture & Society, Globalisation, Societies and Education, Sociology Compass, and Educational Studies. These publications examine the intimate linkages between coloniality, racism, curriculum, knowledge production, and resistance movements unfolding within and beyond formal education institutions. He is also the co-editor of the Bristol University Press book series Decolonization and Social Worlds, lead editor of the Routledge book series Decolonial Entanglements: Praxis, Pedagogy, and Social Theory, and lead editor of the SAGE Handbook of Decolonial Theory.

Brooke Lober
Brooke Lober is a Lecturer in Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. Brooke’s research and writing engages with Jewish feminist/queer/trans activism and cultural production of the late 20th century US, situating both Jewish identity and the transnational Palestine solidarity movement as complex sites for the development of antiracist, anti-imperialist, gender-radical Jewish anti-Zionism. Brooke’s oral history interviews document anti-imperialist and abolitionist feminist organizing in the Bay Area in the 1980s and 90s, resulting in the website womenagainstimperialism.com and the special issue “Out of Control: Lesbian Committee to Free Women Political Prisoners,” for the lesbian journal Sinister Wisdom. Brooke is a co-editor of the two-volume collection Abolition Feminisms (2022), and a contributor to the reader Remaking Radicalism (2020), and the anti-Zionist young adult book, Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah (2023). Brooke’s essays have been published in Feminist Formations, Women’s Studies, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, Meridians, Abolition, and on numerous websites of radical culture. Brooke is a member of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine at UC Berkeley, Feminists for Justice in and for Palestine at the NWSA, the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace, the HALA Collective, and the Bay2Gaza Mutual Aid Collective.

Conor (Coco) Tomás Reed
Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed is a Puerto Rican~Irish, gender-fluid, independent scholar-participant in radical cultural and educational movements in the Americas and the Caribbean, and the author of New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University (Common Notions, 2023). Coco is co-developing the quadrilingual anthology Black Feminist Studies in the Americas and the Caribbean (Malpaís Ediciones), and is a contributing editor with LÁPIZ Journal and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. They are on the Board of Directors for CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at CUNY.

Eli Meyerhoff (commenter)
Eli Meyerhoff is a visiting scholar and program coordinator in the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. His research and organizing focus on abolitionist, decolonial approaches to education institutions and alternative modes of studying. He is the author of a book, Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World (published with University of Minnesota Press, 2019). He also co-wrote “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation.”