Students are making history. All of us should join them
May 17, 2024
Statement from Ontario Federation of Labour President Laura Walton on the one month anniversary of the start of the university protests in solidarity with Palestine.
War on Gaza: Why campus protests are seen as a threat to the global order
Khaled Alqazzaz
14 May 2024
Students demonstrating against Israel's onslaught in Gaza are facing a crackdown by authorities aiming to preserve the status quo
Criticizing Israel? Nonprofit Media Could Lose Tax-Exempt Status Without Due Process
A new anti-terrorism bill would allow the government to take away vital tax exemptions from nonprofit news outlets.
Activists worldwide send a message to America's first lady, Dr. Jill Biden, urging for a ceasefire in Gaza as Israel intentionally kills Palestinian women and children.
Yesterday, Israeli occupation authorities, under the demand of the Israeli Ministry of Communication, arrested journalists suspected of working for the Al Jazeera channel.
Graduates of Virginia Commonwealth University staged a walkout during their commencement ceremony in protest against their university's complicity in Israel's genocide in Gaza.
A pro-Palestine march took place in Belfast, Northern Ireland, calling for a boycott of Eurovision due to Israel's participation and denouncing the prohibition of any Palestine-related protests at the concert regarding the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Arizona State University (ASU) bans Dr. Jonathan Yudelman, who appeared in a video harassing a pro-Palestine Muslim woman.
According to the university president, he is "no longer permitted to be on campus and will never teach here again”
Harvard has rescinded the suspension of a student who had been reporting for the Crimson on the pro-Palestinian encampment, raising questions about how that particular student was identified in the first place. According to the Crimson, the student had not taken part in the protest and had only “infrequently” reported on the encampment. #journalismhttps://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/5/11/harvard-crimson-reporter-involuntary-leave-protest/
BREAKING: Below is what would have been USC valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s commencement speech, as published on USC Annenberg Media and the Daily Trojan.
Mid-April her speech was cancelled citing security reasons triggering a series of events and national coverage.
There is a level of discomfort and cognitive dissonance that keeps growing in me working in HE while scholasticide and ecocide (yes, they are part of the genocide or ethnic cleansing) committed in Gaza for more than half a year, and the deafening silence of Western universities completely ignoring it.
I truly believed that if there is any place in the world when dialogue should and must always be a priority, is in academic fora. Dialogue is the foundation of #academia
1/
And as a designer who has long been involved in local activism for both social justice and environmental action (the 2 are intertwined), I can't but defend the right to protest. Some might say that peaceful protests are ok, but we should condemn violent ones.
However I rarely saw a protest starting as violent. Turned violent? Yes. I'm Italian and the Genova G8 is still a vivid memory. So yes, protests can turn ugly. But were they ugly from the start?
2/
There are exeptions of course, and there are also many protests I disagree with. But in general, the pattern seems to be:
people not in power asks people in power to change
the people in power can respond in various ways: listen to the demands, engage in dialogue, work for a shared solutions (aka 'negotiation'); they can ignore the protest, and wait for it to pass (willful ignorance); or they can use their position of power to suppress it, generally violently (repression)
3/
The latter is a purposeful display of power, which only obtain to radicalise people even more, as it foster and enhances rage and anger. And exactly because of this, repression only leads to more violence and then more repression. It's a vicious cycle that moves away the attention from the original nature of the protest itself, and twist it into a violent mess of power display.
That #Academia, the place for dialogue, chose repression over negotiation is deeply disturbing
4/ #StudentProtest
Because what is the point of producing tons of research about social change, bottom-up strategies, community-led practice-based research, or student wellbeing, if then, when your own corpus of students (and staff) demands actual change based on that same body of research and knowledge production, on the same ethical principles ethics committees fill they mouths and h-index with, you just repress and shut them down, demonising them, and punishing them?
5/
How can we, as scholars, stand in front of the world, and defending our research as valuable, as something for the people, in service of our shared humanity, if then, Universities choose repression over dialogue?
I've been struggling with these questions for months, and tbh, I don't have a clear answers or solutions.
What I know, it is that repression, silencing, and criminalisation of anti-war and anti-genocide dissent is the antithesis of academic values.
6/
For those that prefer to parrot Biden's statements of 'you have the right to protest, but quietly, without disturbing the status quo', I think this article answer to it much better I can:
"Protest is never convenient, never comfortable and frequently unpopular. But dissent from indifference – and through the discomfort of disorder – is the work of choosing democracy."