AAG 2025
On fighting academic/political repression in geography
Dismantling the Palestine Exception 1
- Date: Monday, March 24
- Time: 12:50 PM to 2:10 PM, EDT
- Location: 310A, Level 3, Huntington Place
This panel aims to discuss academic and political repression of Palestine and Palestinian scholarship in Geography. Panelists will discuss historical and contemporary practices of silencing, including the marginalization of Palestinian narratives in global political discourses and the attempted and successful erasure of Palestinian scholarship within academic institutions. Moreover, panelists will address theoretical and methodological exclusions sustaining these practices of silencing and reinforcing colonial or orientalist frameworks of knowledge production. This panel asks how can we link structural barriers, related to engaging with Palestinian issues and Palestine, to wider struggles against academic and political repression historically and contemporarily? What are some practical approaches and strategies to overcome such challenges? And how to harness the discipline’s potential for material moves toward solidarity, equity, and justice?
On divestment and the role of geographers
Dismantling the Palestine Exception 2
- Date: Monday, March 24
- Time: 2:30 PM to 3:50 PM EDT
- Location: 310A, Level 3, Huntington Place
Over the past year, and following a call from Palestinian trade unions—including from the education sector—, many have mobilised against the genocide, urbicide, and scholasticide in Gaza and Lebanon. Actions have included divestment campaigns, boycott pledges, and building and supporting student encampments. These efforts build on successes of the South African anti-apartheid movement, which adopted divestment as a vital practice to build global pressure and end a system of institutionalized racial injustice. Despite widespread efforts, many universities and research institutions remain complicit in Israel’s crimes—through partnerships and investments that support arms companies fueling these attacks. Within this landscape, what is our geographical responsibility? How can we respond to a situation of complete annihilation? How can geography, a discipline committed to social justice and decolonial theory, intervene? How do we live up to the legacy of geography as a critical and radical discipline? And how can we ensure our institutions support critical conversations and engage in meaningful action? This session will be structured as a public forum for those who are curious or veterans. The session will begin with a short presentation led by the Geographers for Justice in Palestine to introduce their work and how you can be involved. The rest of the session will be an open forum to answer any questions and hear any suggestions.
On economic strategies for Palestine solidarity
Dismantling the Palestine Exception 3
- Date: Tuesday, March 25
- Time: 12:50 PM to 2:10 PM EDT
- Location: 310A, Level 3, Huntington Place
International solidarity with national liberation movements has taken a variety of forms across history. This roundtable session looks to economic strategies, including (but not limited to) boycotts, blockades, and divestment, to gather lessons and learnings for the current liberation struggle in Palestine. As we submit this session, the Israeli invasion on Gaza extends beyond one year, an aggression that has expanded to the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran. The Israeli attacks on Gaza are an extension of the Nakba or ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land in 1948, and the development of a settler-colonial fascist regime that denies Palestinians basic rights through the use of occupation, discriminatory laws, and military violence. In Palestine and across the diaspora, people have turned to economic strategies to resist the occupation and the Israeli settler-colonial regime. From the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) to blockades of Israeli ports to the demands for an arms embargo, this panel asks both what can we learn from previous economic solidarity strategies, and how might we apply these learnings (as Geographers, as academic workers, as people of conscience) to boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns both within and outside the academy.
Escalate! The Campus Encampments - What Worked, What Didn’t?
Dismantling the Palestine Exception 4
- Date: Tuesday, March 25
- Time: 2:30 PM to 3:50 PM EDT
- Location: 310A, Level 3, Huntington Place
Amidst the latest iteration of Israel’s long standing genocidal war against Palestinians, college students across the world launched Palestine solidarity encampments on hundreds of campuses. These encampments, not unlike those of the Arab uprisings and the Occupy movements that came before them, offered temporary autonomous zones on university campuses where uttering the words Palestine had been directly or indirectly banished from many classrooms. They brought together students, faculty, staff, and community members to share strategies around divestment, blockades, and occupations, all intended to throw a wrench in the transnational complicity of higher education in Israel’s genocidal campaign. They also soon became flashpoints for direct clashes with the police and with paramilitary forces organized by neo-fascist Zionist mobs. This session will explore the on-the-ground, and place-based reality of the individual encampments. It will ask, what worked well in these encampments? What strategies and tactics failed? How might we situate the encampments in the broader geography of the Palestine solidarity movement?
On Teaching Palestine in an Age of Genocide
Dismantling the Palestine Exception 5
- Date: Wednesday, March 26
- Time: 10:10 AM to 11:30 AM EDT
- Location: 310A, Level 3, Huntington Place
This session will explore the possibilities, responsibilities, and challenges of teaching about Palestine amidst an ongoing genocide. Education on Palestine in the United States and much of the Western world has long been fraught with institutional and discursive pressures to conform to Zionist narratives and perspectives. Even the mere use of the word “Palestine” elicits administrative alarm in many universities, so much so that a course with “Palestine” in its title, much less content related to Palestinian resistance, cannot often pass through the necessary gatekeepers to appear on an official curriculum. Instructors who still manage to include material on Palestine and/or Palestinian scholars in their courses face, at best, student complaints and, at worst, risks to their employment and safety. Women, non-binary, and instructors of color, especially Arab and Palestinian professors, face particular scrutiny. Coupled with a news media that significantly distorts, and often erases, the realities of Palestine, these academic restrictions mean that most students who graduate from universities do so without even a rudimentary understanding of the historical and political geographies of Palestine.
These institutional constraints have only increased since October 2023. Yet, in the face of an ongoing genocide, which has put Palestine at the center of political and media debate, and at the top of many students’ social media feeds, teaching the geographies of Palestine has never been more important. Building upon the DOPE (Dimensions of Political Ecology) + Palestine pre-conference, this AAG session seeks to examine the strategies different instructors have used to effectively teach various geographies of Palestine. Panelists will discuss curricular and pedagogical successes and/or impediments they have faced as well as ideas for cross-institutional cooperation. We hope that this session leaves panelists and attendees with renewed inspiration to include Palestine in their courses, a broader array of approaches to do so, and a stronger network of colleagues who will support them as they move forward.
On Teaching Palestine in an Age of Genocide
Dismantling the Palestine Exception 6
- Date: Wednesday, March 26
- Time: 12:50 PM to 2:10 PM EDT
- Location: 310A, Level 3, Huntington Place
This session will explore the possibilities, responsibilities, and challenges of teaching about Palestine amidst an ongoing genocide. Education on Palestine in the United States and much of the Western world has long been fraught with institutional and discursive pressures to conform to Zionist narratives and perspectives. Even the mere use of the word “Palestine” elicits administrative alarm in many universities, so much so that a course with “Palestine” in its title, much less content related to Palestinian resistance, cannot often pass through the necessary gatekeepers to appear on an official curriculum. Instructors who still manage to include material on Palestine and/or Palestinian scholars in their courses face, at best, student complaints and, at worst, risks to their employment and safety. Women, non-binary, and instructors of color, especially Arab and Palestinian professors, face particular scrutiny. Coupled with a news media that significantly distorts, and often erases, the realities of Palestine, these academic restrictions mean that most students who graduate from universities do so without even a rudimentary understanding of the historical and political geographies of Palestine.
These institutional constraints have only increased since October 2023. Yet, in the face of an ongoing genocide, which has put Palestine at the center of political and media debate, and at the top of many students’ social media feeds, teaching the geographies of Palestine has never been more important. Building upon the DOPE (Dimensions of Political Ecology) + Palestine pre-conference, this AAG session seeks to examine the strategies different instructors have used to effectively teach various geographies of Palestine. Panelists will discuss curricular and pedagogical successes and/or impediments they have faced as well as ideas for cross-institutional cooperation. We hope that this session leaves panelists and attendees with renewed inspiration to include Palestine in their courses, a broader array of approaches to do so, and a stronger network of colleagues who will support them as they move forward.
On solidarities across geographies
Dismantling the Palestine Exception 7
- Date: Wednesday, March 26
- Time: 2:30 PM to 3:50 PM EDT
- Location: 310A, Level 3, Huntington Place
This panel discusses historical and contemporary ties between colonial projects and the ensuing movements of resistance. The focus of the session will be to explore forms of solidarity, material and intellectual, across different geographies, while centering Palestine. Speakers will comment on historical examples such as indigenous struggle in Turtle Island, and South Africa, in relation to current pro-Palestinian initiatives, with the intent of connecting frameworks of knowledge production and resistance. This session will ask how historical and ongoing anti-colonial struggles can meaningfully connect and mutually develop? What do international solidarities look like? How does the spatial dimension, across and within terrains of struggle, affect the political sphere? And how can mutual solidarities be productive in the present historical conjuncture?