Keynote 3: Sunaina Maira on a long war of position: Palestine, BDS, and besieging the siege

This keynote lecture took place at the Gramsci in the Middle East & North Africa Conference organised by the LSE Middle East Centre in cooperation with Ghent University. The conference explored, through empirically-grounded research, how Gramsci’s work can help us make sense of our contemporary moment in the region marked by a significant expansion in resistance and uprising. Sunaina Maira is Professor of Asian American Studies, and is affiliated with the Middle East/South Asia Studies program and with the Cultural Studies Graduate Group at the University of California, Davis. Her research and teaching focus on Asian, Arab, and Muslim American youth culture, migrant rights and refugee organizing, and transnational movements challenging militarization, imperialism, and settler colonialism John Chalcraft is Professor of Middle East History and Politics in the Department of Government at the LSE. He graduated with a starred first in history (M.A. Hons) from Gonville and Caius college Cambridge in 1992. He then did post-graduate work at Harvard, Oxford and New York University, from where he received his doctorate with distinction in the modern history of the Middle East in January 2001. He held a Research Fellowship at Caius college (1999-2000) and was a Lecturer in Modern Middle Eastern History in the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Edinburgh University from 2000-05. This conference was supported by the Departments of Government, Sociology, and the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme based at the International Inequalities Institute, LSE.