Policing Campus Palestine Protests

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This panel will discuss the ongoing significance of the elevated policing of students, faculty, staff involved in Palestinian solidarity protests on university campuses. We will discuss Cops Off Campus strategies and other protective initiatives in the face of police repression. As the situation on campuses continues to escalate,  with Trump's new Executive Orders against activist students that may involve increased deportation threats for international or immigrant students, universities are more and more implicated in the question of what American carcerality will look like, going forward. Panelists will also debate whether  the emergence of "authoritarian university" in Spring 2024 formed a lead-in to the rapid post-electoral transition to an authoritarian state.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Erica Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University

Panelists

• Andrew Ross, New York University

• Annelise Orleck, Dartmouth College

• Rana M Jaleel, University of California-Davis

• Elizabeth Esch

Biographical Information

Andrew Ross: Andrew Ross is Professor of American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, and director of the Prison Education Program Research Lab. He is the author or editor of more than twenty-five books, including most recently, Abolition Labor: The Fight to End Prison Slavery.

Elizabeth Esch: Associate professor and director of undergraduate studies, American Studies Dept, University of Kansas, author of The Color Line and the Assembly Line: The Ford Motor Company in Brazil, South Africa and the United States. University of California Press, 2018.

Annelise Orleck: Annelise Orleck teaches History, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.
She is the author of five books and co-editor of two on women’s, immigrant and poor people’s movements. Among them are: Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-class Politics in the United States; Storming Caesars’ Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty; Rethinking American Women’s Activism; and We Are All Fast Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages. Her articles have appeared in Labor; The Guardian; Salon; Jacobin; Mother Jones and the LA Review of Books, among other places.

Rana Jaleel: Rana M. Jaleel is an Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. At UC Davis, Dr. Jaleel is a 2022-2025 Chancellor’s Fellow and a 2021-2024 College of Arts & Sciences Dean's Faculty Fellow. Her first book, The Work of Rape received a 2021 Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and was co-winner of the 2022 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Prize from the National Women's Studies Association. Her academic work has been published in places like South Atlantic Quarterly, Amerasia, The Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Cultural Studies, Social Text: Periscope, and The Brooklyn Law Review. Dr. Jaleel is part of the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal’s Editorial Collective. A longtime member of the American Association of University Professors, she presently chairs the Association's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

Erica Meiners: Writer, educator and organizer, Erica R. Meiners’ current books include For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State (University of Minnesota 2016); the co-authored Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence (Verso 2020); and with Haymarket Press a 2018 co-edited anthology The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Towards Freedom; and the co-authored 2022 Abolition. Feminism. Now. A Visiting Scholar at a range of universities and centers - Humbolt University, Trent University, CUNY Graduate Center, the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, and Chicago’s Leather Archives and Museum, Erica has published articles in a wide range of publications including In These Times, Social Text, Radical Teacher, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Advocate, Boston Review. The Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor at Northeastern Illinois University, Erica is a member of her labor union, University Professionals of Illinois, and teaches classes in education, gender and sexuality studies, and justice studies. Most importantly, Erica has collaboratively started and works alongside others in a range of ongoing mobilizations for liberation, particularly movements that involve access to free public education for all, and other queer abolitionist struggles. A member of Critical Resistance, the Illinois Death in Custody Project, and the Prison+Neighborhood Arts / Education Project, Erica is a sci-fi fan, an avid runner, and a lover of bees and cats.