Who We Are

We are geographers, faculty, students and people of conscience organizing in response to institutional silence and complicity with the Israeli state’s colonial, discriminatory and oppressive policies towards Palestinians.

The campaign is coordinated by an organizing collective, whose members include:

• Yousuf Al-Bulushi, University of California, Irvine
• Mohammed Rafi Arefin, University of British Columbia
• Adam Bledsoe, University of Minnesota
• Deb Cowen, University of Toronto
• Ananya Roy, University of California, Los Angeles
• Omar Jabary Salamanca, Université libre de Bruxelles
• Sara Smith, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Kendra Strauss, Simon Fraser University

We come together in the midst of a genocidal war against Palestinians and in the aftermath of massive protests and repression on university campuses across the globe.

We are appalled with Israel’s killing and detention of Palestinian colleagues and the systematic and willful destruction of education and knowledge systems, including universities, schools, libraries and archives.

We strive to support the Palestinian call for the academic boycott of Israel and to join the growing international campaign led by scholars, intellectuals, trade unions and other civil society organizations until Israel is held accountable for its violations and abides by international law.

We work in support of justice and human rights in Palestine/Israel and for the right to education, free speech and academic freedom for all members of campus communities.

As scholars, and as members of professional geography associations such as the AAG, the RGS and the ICGG, we bear a unique responsibility to confront academic complicity and to expose and repudiate our discipline’s historical relation to empire, militarism and colonialism.

It is in this spirit that we stand firm in our belief that ethical principles must guide our professional collaborations and academic endeavors to craft abolitionist geographies for justice and liberation.