Join us for an urgent discussion on the targeted repression of scholar-activist Prof. Mohamed Abdou and the future of the student Palestine solidarity movement.

Student encampments have swept the country in solidarity with besieged Palestinians. In response, both students and faculty have faced physical attacks, threats to their enrollment, and firings. As part of Congress's McCarthyist attack on Palestine solidarity at Columbia University, Prof. Mohamed Abdou has been targeted and slandered for his pro-Palestine commitments and activism. His outspoken support for Palestinian liberation has garnered attention and attacks from right-wing outlets but more damning is Rep. Elise Stefanik’s rhetoric, who grilled Columbia University president Minouche Shafik in a House hearing about Prof. Abdou.

Prof. Abdou's case presents a litmus test for academic freedom at a crucial moment where the fate of US universities as bold spaces for critical thinking hangs in the balance. Prof. Abdou's case in particular telescopes crucial struggles of the larger Palestine solidarity movement, including Islamophobia, settler colonialism, and generalized repression.

Speakers

Linda Quiquivix is a geographer, writer, and translator organizing with Occupied Chumash and Tongva lands toward a world where many worlds fit. She is author of the forthcoming Palestine 1492: A Report Back. You can learn more about her work at quiqui.org

Dr. Mohamed Abdou is a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition, and decolonization with extensive fieldwork experience in the Middle East-North Africa, Asia, and Turtle Island. This year, he is the Arcapita Visiting Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. He is a former Assistant Professor of Sociology at the American University of Cairo and recently completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University. He has also taught at the University of Toronto & Queen's University. His research stems from his involvement with the anti-globalization post-Seattle 1999 movements, organizing for Palestinian liberation, the Tyendinaga Mohawks and the sister territories of Kahnawake, Akwesasne, and Kanehsatake, during the standoff over the Culbertson tract, as well as the anti-war protests of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Indigenous Zapatista movement in Chiapas, and the 2011 Egyptian uprisings. He is author of Islam & Anarchism: Relationships & Resonances (Pluto Press, 2022). He wrote his transnational ethnographic and historical-archival PhD dissertation on Islam & Queer-Muslims: Identity & Sexuality in the Contemporary (2019).

Campus Encampment Photo Credit: عباد ديرانية, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.