The Academic Question of Palestine

LSE Middle East Centre Podcasts

This event was 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 discussed 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 engaged with the epistemic ramifications of the question of Palestine, especially its theoretical and political relevance to freedom of speech, student mobilisation and academic boycott. 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. 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. 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. 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.