In Defense of Academic Freedom: Defamation, Intimidation, and Suspension Part 2 (11 April)

In Defense of Academic Freedom: Defamation, Intimidation, and Suspension Part 2 (11 April)

In Defense of Academic Freedom: Defamation, Intimidation, and Suspension Part 2 (11 April)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

In Defense of Academic Freedom:

Defamation, Intimidation, and Suspension


Featuring:
Danny Shaw
Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda


Moderators:
Bassam Haddad
Mariam Durrani


Organized by 
DC, Maryland, & Virginia Faculty for Academic Freedom and Gaza in Conrtext Collaborative Project; Cosponsored by MESA Task Force on Civil and Human Rights, MESA's Committee on Academic Freedom, Faculty for Justice in Palestine Network (115+ chapters nationally)

www.PalestineInContext.org

Thursday, 11 April 2024
1:00 PM EST


In this second installment, we host two faculty members who have been suspended/fired for their support of Palestine during Israel’s ongoing Genocide in Gaza. They will tell their own story and address the context of their scholarship and advocacy, as well as how their academic freedom was violated. They are not alone.

In Defense of Academic Freedom

The assault on academic freedom is growing on University campuses. We are launching this series to address the cases of defamation, intimidation, and suspension that faculty are being subjected to in the United States and beyond. This series aims to raise awareness of the conditions and pretenses under which such violations occur and provide resources to contend with them, not least in support of the most vulnerable targets.

This event is Co-Sponsored by the Gaza in Context Collaborative Project

Co-Organizers: Arab Studies Institute, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, George Mason University’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program, Rutgers Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Birzeit University Museum, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies, University of Chicago’s Center for Contemporary Theory, Brown University’s New Directions in Palestinian Studies, Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies, Georgetown University-Qatar, American University of Cairo’s Alternative Policy Studies, Middle East Studies Association’s Global Academy, University of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, CUNY’s Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center, University of Illinois Chicago’s Arab american cultural Center, George Mason University’s AbuSulayman’s Center for Global Islamic Studies, University of Illinois Chicago’s Critical Middle East Studies Working Group, George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies, Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies, New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies

Featuring 


Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda
 is a translator and teacher. Born in Tokyo, raised in Texas, she received her BA from Wesleyan University and her PhD from UC Berkeley. She has taught at Grinnell College, Bard College, and CUNY. She currently works as a freelance literary translator in New York City.   

Danny Shaw teaches Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Race, Ethnicity, Class and Gender at the City University of New York.  He holds a Masters in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is fluent in Spanish, Haitian Kreyol, Portuguese, Cape Verdean Kreolu and has a fair command of French, and works as an International Affairs Analyst for TeleSUR, RT and other international news networks. He has worked and organized in seventy different countries, opening his spirit to countless testimonies about the inhumanity of the international economic system. He is a Golden Gloves boxer, fighting twice in Madison Square Garden for the NYC heavyweight championship. He teaches boxing, yoga and nutrition and works as a Sober Coach. A Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, he works to keep young people out of the military and prison industrial complex. He is a mentor to many guiding them through the nutritional, ideological, social and emotional landmines that surround us. He is the father of two young Life Warriors, Ernesto Rafael and Caũa Amaru. He is the author of six books: 365 Days of Resistance, Shedding that which is Not Us: A Working-Class Guide to Life Foods Training and Healing, The Saints of Santo Domingo: Dominican Resistance in the Age of Neocolonialism, My Son Blazes within Me: So Many Contradictions, So Little Time, Paisajes de Amor y Combate and Los Santos de Santo Domingo. He has also authored blogs and articles on Latin American history, boxing and nutrition, among other topics.  

Bassam Haddad (Moderator) is Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam is Executive Producer of Status Podcast Channel and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding The Syrian Tragedy: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).  

Mariam Durrani (Moderator) is a Professorial Lecturer at the School of International Service and a faculty affiliate with the Anti-Racism Research and Policy Center at American University. As a decolonial feminist anthropologist, Dr. Durrani's scholarship seeks to shift how academia, media, and public discourse reflect on and reckon with the racialized "Muslim" subject and the impact of global wars on higher education in the US and Pakistan. 


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