Roundtables

Last March marked the 20th anniversary of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, promoted at that time as a reprisal for the attacks of September 11, 2001, and a vital military campaign within the broader ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT). Today, while many students born after 9/11 see these inaugural ev..

On December 8, 2023, Academics for Justice in Palestine (AJP) at UCSB held a public forum. AJP is a group of academic laborers committed to freedom and justice in Palestine. Introduced by Walid Afifi, Professor of Communication at UCSB, the event posed the question "Can We Talk about Palestine?"..

Words that are in danger of remaining unspoken when we say “it is too complicated” or “I don’t know enough about the issue” or “it is too divisive” or “it hurts my feelings.” It is critical commonplace that the unspoken as resounding silence indexes nothing less than a repressive apparatus: in t..

I stand with you today, a settler on unceded Chumash land. A land drenched in ongoing genocide and resistance to it.  I owe a debt to this land and its history.

I come to Palestine with questions about borders. That national borders are spaces of state violence is not new information. But, the current graphic articulation of borders as exertion of state power is breathtaking. The violence of mundane forms of settler-colonialism comes together with what ..

For better or worse, my expertise is what is legal in war. It may seem, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the laws of war, that it’s almost oxymoronic. Legal in war? But there is a thing called international humanitarian law. And “humanitarian” signals the centrality of protecting civilia..

I came to Palestine and to anti-Zionism from a commitment to collective liberation and from my involvement in queer and trans organizing.  One of the centerpieces of Israel’s public relations campaign is to characterize Palestinians as savages who are hyper homophobic and misogynistic, and to ch..

I recall the streets of the Egyptian Revolution thirteen years ago. People mobilized themselves and their tools to reimagine global networks of power. A global vision was at the core of their practices. For Alaa Abd el-Fattah, an incarcerated Egyptian political activist, writer, and coder, the E..