Edited Volume Call for Papers: Exiled Scholars in Western Academia: Refugees or Intellectuals?

Edited Volume Call for Papers: Exiled Scholars in Western Academia: Refugees or Intellectuals?

Edited Volume Call for Papers: Exiled Scholars in Western Academia: Refugees or Intellectuals?

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Edited Volume Call for Papers

Exiled Scholars in Western Academia: Refugees or Intellectuals?


Abstract Deadline: 30 April 2023 
Submission Procedure Below 

Editors


Alfred Babo Ph.D. (Fairfield University) ababo@fairfield.edu 
Sayed Hassan Akhlaq Ph.D. (Coppin State University) shussaini@coppin.edu

Potential Publishers


Editors are in contact with potential publishers, including Routledge, Palgrave MacMillan, University of Wisconsin Press, and Liverpool University Press (Migrations and Identities series).

Book Description and Conceptual Frame


This book aims to engage exiled scholars in an intellectual examination of the nexus of personal and professional experiences in Western universities. Contributors will share their own unique experiences in order to reflect on the changing nature of knowledge production, transfer, and exchange in a world increasingly defined by forced migration. Such reflections are not new. In her 1943 essay "We Refugees," the exiled academic Hannah Arendt called on refugees to rethink and affirm their legal and social status in the face of the pull to forget trauma and assimilate quickly. In the process, she made the concept of refugee into a key term for modern scholarship and thought. Today, in the globalized context where the concept of “refugee” increasingly attracts both empathy and rejection, refugee scholars housed in Western universities cannot help but question the fluidity of their identity. Are they refugees or intellectuals? Can they be recognized as both refugees and scholars? This duality of identity creates new opportunities for rethinking concepts such as humanitarianism, indigenization, asylum, diversity, scholar activism, and the transnational production of knowledge in the universities of the twenty-first century. Assembling scholars from around the world who are working in the fields of political science, international studies, anthropology, law, philosophy, and the humanities, this volume addresses both the geopolitical predicaments and the intellectual contributions of exiled academics in our troubled times.

Contributors to this volume should integrate personal life difficulties and/or successes, mixed with emotional distress and cultural adjustments, into a scholarly analysis of academia in exile.

The volume consists of three parts structured around the following questions:

Part 1: Transnational Knowledge Production and Academic Identity


How do exiled scholars understand the hybridization and indigenization of research and teaching?

How do the host social and work environments serve or not serve the production of transnational knowledge? How do they understand the interdisciplinarity and globalization of knowledge?

Part 2: Immobility within Academic Mobility


How has asylum status for a “Safe Haven” impaired scholars’ mobility and banned their global activism? How do such stories reframe academic understandings of asylum, sanctuary, and refuge, considered historically, legally, and culturally?

How has establishing a career in the host country motivated scholars to re-invent and re-localize research topics and fields in a new institutional context? Has this happened easily and voluntarily or under duress? What are the intellectual fruits of such reinvention?

Part 3: At-Risk Scholars Navigating the Academic Career


How has the journey to a tenure-track position implied the social vulnerability or success of refugee scholars? How did it differ from the professional trajectory of a non-refugee scholar?

How do displaced scholars describe the impact of factors like identity, race, ethnicity, and refugee status in their job search and their academic success/failure, and how do these reflections challenge or transform current practices of diversity, equity, and inclusion? How do refugee scholars reflect on the dynamic evolution of their social and intellectual identities?

Submission Procedure


Abstract — Please submit your abstract of no more than 500 words and a brief bio to the editors by April 30, 2023 (ababo@fairfield.edu and shussaini@coppin.edu). Authors must mention the questions of interest to them and describe the methodology/kinds of data that will be used and how they will combine their personal reflections with the scholarly responses to the questions.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412