George Mason's Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine presents

Resisting the Ratcheting Up of Repression
in Academia and on Campus

Featuring: 
Emmaia Gelman

Moderator:
Bassam Haddad
Bethany Letiecq

Wednesday, 4 September 2024
3:00 PM EST | 10:00 PM Palestine

Co-sponsored by the Gaza In Context Collaborative Teach-In Series

This conversation will address the ratcheting up of repression we witness in academia and on campus as the fall semester commences. Our guest will also identify and examine and the organizational infrastructure driving this escalation in an attempt to stifle, silence, and criminalize objections to Israel’s Genocide, which continues unabated despite the incredulous killing of more than 40,000 Palestinians, including 16,000 children, and the destruction of nearly all homes/infrastructure in Gaza. Emmaia will also talk about the overlap and coordination between these groups and other right wing organizations that have a history of targeting higher education.

Featuring 

Emmaia Gelman taught at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University. She is the founding Director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which examines the political and ideological work of Zionist institutions beyond their direct advocacy for Israel. Her research and writing investigate the history of ideas about race, queerness, safety, and rights, and their production as political levers in the realm of hate crimes policy, surveillance, anti-terror measures, and war. She is at work on a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League (1913-1990) as a Cold War neoconservative institution, and an edited collection of essays by organizers and academics on the ADL’s present political work, its origins, and its historical evolution. Her writing has been published in the Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Boston Review, Newsweek, the Forward, Jewish Currents, Abusable Past, Truthout, and many other outlets. She is the co-chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism, and a longtime activist in New York City on Palestine, po
licing, antiracism, and queer issues.

Bassam Haddad is Founding 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 serves on the Board of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and is Executive Producer of Status Audio Magazine 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 Calamity: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).

Bethany Letiecq is professor of research methods in the College of Education and Human Development and a co-founder of the anti-racist and decolonizing research collaborative at George Mason University. She is President of the GMU chapter of the AAUP and Past-President of the Virginia Conference of the AAUP.  She was recently elected as Vice-President of the AAUP Advocacy Local 6741 of the AFT. She is also President of the National Council on Family Relations. Across positions, she is working to support movements for academic freedom, faculty and student empowerment, knowledge democratization, and the advancement of intersectional justice.