Gaza in Context: A Collaborative Project
 

Students Rising:

Dismantling Repression, Imagining Futures

A Converstation with Student Encampment Representatives

Featuring:
Students from DC, MD, VA, NY +

Moderator:
Bassam Haddad

Thursday, 2 May 2024
1:30 PM EST | 7:30 PM Palestine 

Student protests against Israel’s Genocide in Gaza have engulfed campuses across the United States, overwhelmingly in the form of peaceful, community-oriented encampments. Yet, they have been maligned to no end via a concerted effort led by corporate media, pro-Israel organizations/groups, and significant segments of the political class. Excessively violent police raids and widespread arrests of both students and faculty ensued. Administrations have been quick to call for shutting down protests and encampments. We address the demands of the students, the world they imagine, and the broader context within which encampments are constructed and dismantled.

Gaza in Context Collaborative Teach-In Series

We are together experiencing a catastrophic unfolding of history as Gaza endures a massive invasion of potentially genocidal proportions. This follows an incessant bombardment of a population increasingly bereft of the necessities of living in response to the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7. The context within which this takes place includes a well-coordinated campaign of misinformation and the unearthing of a multitude of essentialist and reductionist discursive tropes that dehumanize Palestinians as the culprits, despite a context of structural subjugation and Apartheid, now a matter of consensus in the human rights movement.

The co-organizers below are convening weekly teach-ins and conversations on a host of issues that introduce our common university communities, educators, researchers, and students to the history and present of Gaza, in context. 

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