After contextualising violence and dispossession in Palestine (often facilitated through national and international law and regulation), panelists will reflect on how scholars and teachers can navigate their work amid institutional complicity, political repression, and the increasing criminalization of dissent. The discussion will address the challenges of building solidarity within the university and beyond, supporting one another in the face of administrative retaliation, police violence, and the chilling of academic freedom, and standing with students who encounter institutional silence, or outright brutality, when they speak out.

The panel also confronts the ethical dissonance of holding such conversations in comparatively “safe” academic spaces while, elsewhere, students, staff, and faculty face systematic repression, and while universities in Gaza have been destroyed entirely. What does it mean to teach and convene under these conditions? How do we reckon with our own positionality and complicity? What forms of accountability are possible, and necessary, within academic institutions? And what responsibilities do we bear toward colleagues and students in Palestine and elsewhere, for whom survival itself is under constant threat?

Panelists

Prof. Brenna Bhandar, University of British Columbia.
Dr. Hadeel Abu Hussain, International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University
Dr. Mikki Stelder, University of Amsterdam

Moderators

Dr. Vladimir Bogoeski, University of Amsterdam
Dr. Kanad Bagchi, University of Amsterdam

To attend this panel, please register using the form below.