The Academic Question of Palestine

This event will be a conversation around the special issue 'The Academic Question of Palestine' published by the journal Middle East Critique. This issue was guest-edited by Walaa Alqaisiya and Nicola Perugini.

Drawing on the various contributions of the special issue, speakers will discuss the sense of intellectual and political emergency that has triggered the need for this project—the emergency produced by thousands of instances of repression against scholarship, scholars, and students working on the question of Palestine across the world. 

Bringing together students and scholars, this event will engage with the epistemic ramifications of the question of Palestine, especially its theoretical and political relevance to freedom of speech, student mobilisation and academic boycott.

Read the special issue here.

Meet the speakers

Walaa Alqaisiya is a Marie Curie Global Fellow working across Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Columbia University and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Walaa is author of Decolonial Queering in Palestine (Routledge), which examines queer politics and aesthetics from a Palestinian native positionality. Walaa’s Marie Curie Fellowship extends her work on settler colonialism, decoloniality and gender whilst bringing an ecological and environmental dimension to these fields.

Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum Studies and Teacher Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Texas Tech University. His research is situated at the intersections of sociocultural studies in education, curriculum studies, decolonial theory, and qualitative methodology. Through critical ethnography, he analyzes and interprets the curricular and pedagogical implications of activist spaces and student movements. 

Dasha M is the former president of Columbia Law Students for Palestine, a constituent organization of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition. Along with student peers in and outside CUAD, she co-wrote the article “Palestine is the Vanguard for Our Liberation: Insights from the Students’ Intifada at Columbia University” featured in this special issue.

Nicola Perugini is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses mainly on the politics of international law, human rights, and violence. He is the co-author of The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford University Press 2015), Morbid Symptoms (Sharjah Biennial 13, 2017), and Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (University of California Press 2020).

Lara Sheehi is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar. Lara’s work takes up decolonial and anti-oppressive approaches to psychoanalysis, with a focus on liberation struggles in the Global South. She is co-author with Stephen Sheehi of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Routledge, 2022). She is currently working on a new book, From the Clinic to the Street: Psychoanalysis for Revolutionary Futures (Pluto Press).

Anna Younes is a German Palestinian scholar. Her focus rests on what she has coined the "war on antisemitism" in her 2015 PhD dissertation, a counterinsurgency war following in the footsteps of a post-WWII new world order, framed by tactics used in the War on Drugs and most prominently the War on Terror. Younes thinks transnationally and transhistorically and has publications in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Her work zooms in on settler colonial theories, psychoanalysis and race critical theories.

This event will be chaired by Michael Mason.

Michael Mason is Director of the Middle East Centre. At LSE, he is also Professor of Environmental Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment and an associate of the Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. 

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