In Defense of Academic Freedom Session 9
The Frontlines of Educator Resistance
Featuring:
Karim Mattar
Sherena Razek
Bill Mullen
Moderators:
Anne Feder
Bassam Haddad
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)
Thursday, 28 August 2025 | 3:00 PM EST
The assault on academic freedom is intensifying on University campuses. This series takes note of cases of defamation, intimidation, and suspension that faculty are being subjected to in the United States and beyond. We aim to raise awareness regarding the conditions and pretenses under which such violations occur.
Join academics, activists, and educators to discuss how we organize workers across positions in higher education and K-12 in advance of the school year to push back against the repression at our institutions. We will discuss a variety of tactics, including leveraging internal processes with the support of unions, legal avenues, public pressure campaigns, and boycotts.
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
Karim Mattar is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A descendant of survivors of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, he works at the intersection of Palestine studies, the humanities, and higher education. He is currently at work on two book projects. The Ethics of Affiliation: Palestine and the Future of Humanism seeks to develop a curriculum and a public pedagogy of truth and reconciliation in historic Palestine, focusing on the areas of education, culture, public institutions, civil society, and law. Writing the Catastrophe: Trauma and Responsibility Across Generations interweaves personal experience, family history, cultural critique, and political analysis to tell a multigenerational, transcontinental story of responsibility to Palestine, with a special emphasis on American higher education during the genocide. Also a dedicated community organizer, Karim works at the local, state, and national levels to enhance public awareness and understanding of Palestinian literature, history, and politics and to advocate for the liberation of Palestine. Karim received his D.Phil. in English at the University of Oxford in 2013, and writes and teaches more broadly on comparative Middle Eastern literatures and cultures, the history of the novel, media and technology, and critical theory.
Sherena Razek is a diasporic Palestinian feminist educator, scholar, activist, and labor organizer. Currently, she is a President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. She recently received her PhD from the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University where she was the President of the Graduate Labor Organization and co-founder of the Palestine Solidarity Caucus. Her research focuses on Palestinian visual culture, anti-imperial struggle, and decolonial feminist ecologies.
Bill Mullen is Professor Emeritus at Purdue and a CAHE Steering Committee member. He is also Secretary/Treasurer for AAUP 6741.
Anna Feder spent nearly two decades in higher education, with the last twelve years dedicated to running the Bright Lights Cinema Series, a free public exhibition program that emphasized social justice films at Emerson College in Boston. Her termination and the cancellation of her series have led to a lawsuit claiming that Emerson violated her free speech rights. Additionally, Annais an organizer with the Palestine Anti-Repression Network, a platform that builds solidarity among educators on the frontlines of resistance. She is currently collaborating with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom at the AAUP to document the experiences of educators who have faced repression for their support of Palestinian liberation.
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 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 Calamity: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).