Gaza in Context: A Collaborative Teach-In Series

What Have We Learned?

 Israel’s Genocide — One Year On

Featuring: 
Susan Abulhawa

Hosted by:
Bassam Haddad

Sunday, 22 December 2024
2:00 PM EST | 9:00 PM Palestine

Join our fifteenth edition of “What Have We Learned?” after one year of Israel’s Genocide with Susan Abulhawa, hosted by Bassam Hadddad. Scholars, journalists, activists, and authors select 5 themes/topics and analyze what we have learned about them. 

Gaza in Context Project is billing this series as lessons learned, one year on, to break through the fog of observations, narratives, data, propaganda, and images we unfathomably continue to access/witness every day. These conversations are relatively short, intense, and insightful, delivered by thoroughly engaged speakers.

Gaza in Context Collaborative Teach-In Series

We are together experiencing a catastrophic unfolding of history as Gaza awaits 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 depict Palestinians as the culprits, despite a context of structural subjugation and Apartheid, 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.

Featuring

Susan Abulhawa is a novelist, poet, essayist, scientist, mother, and activist. Her debut novel Mornings in Jenin (Bloomsbury, 2010), translated into 30 languages, was an international bestseller and is considered a classic in Palestinian literature. Her second novel, The Blue Between Sky and Water came out with Bloomsbury in 2015, and her third, Against the Loveless World, was published in 2020 by Simon & Schuster. She is also the author of a poetry collection, My Voice Sought The Wind (Just World Books, 2013), a contributor to several anthologies, a political commentator, an advocate for animal rights and liberation, and for ecological conservation. abulhawa is the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, an organization dedicated to uplifting Palestinian children and Executive Director of the Palestine Writes Literary Festival.

Bassam Haddad (Host) 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 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).