Speaking Out of Place

Recent weeks have seen a series of strikes between Israel and Iran. Israel's attack on an Iranian embassy building in Damascus, killing seven, followed by Iranian barrage of missile and drone strikes on Israel, killing no one, and then followed by Israeli strikes on Iran in Isfahan all of this occurring, of course, with the continuing unfolding genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and intensifying violence in the West Bank. As these strikes between Israel and Iran ignited fears of a regional conflagration, we are joined on the show by prominent Iran scholar and anthropologist Narges Bajoghli, whose most recent co-authored book is an in-depth study of the impact and perverse effects of sanctions on Iran, as well as by eminent scholar of international law John Quigley.We discuss recent events from the perspective of international law and dissect dangerously pervasive myths, assumptions and racist tropes informing policy with respect to Iran.Narges Bajoghli is Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies. She is an award-winning anthropologist, writer, and professor. Trained as a political anthropologist, media anthropologist, and documentary filmmaker, Narges' research is at the intersections of media, power, and resistance. She is the author of several books, including the award-winning book Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic (Stanford University Press 2019; winner 2020 Margaret Mead Award; 2020 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title; 2021 Silver Medal in Independent Publisher Book Awards for Current Events);  ​How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare (with Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Esfahani, and Ali Vaez, Stanford University Press 2024); and a graphic novella, Sanctioned Lives (2024). Before joining the Ohio State faculty in 1969, Professor John B. Quigley was a research scholar at Moscow State University, and a research associate in comparative law at Harvard Law School. Professor Quigley teaches International Law and Comparative Law. In 1982-83 he was a visiting professor at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.Professor Quigley is active in international human rights work. His numerous publications include books and articles on human rights, the United Nations, war and peace, east European law, African law, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. In 1995 he was recipient of The Ohio State University Distinguished Scholar Award. He formerly held the title of President’s Club Professor of Law.

Discusses how university leaders stifle free speech to appease politicians and donors, focusing on protests against Palestinian genocide at Columbia. Features student activists and professors highlighting challenges faced, including manipulation of safety concerns. Explores struggles of pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus, emphasizing consistency and honesty in advocating for Palestinian rights. Also touches on navigating conversations on sensitive Islamic concepts and resilience in Palestine despite suppression.

Neve Gordon, Laurie Brand, and Adi Mansour discuss the suppression of Palestine solidarity at universities in the US, UK, and Israel, highlighting disciplinary measures such as harassment and dismissals. They explore challenges to free speech, academic freedom, and the intersection of politics and academia.

Noura Erakat and Jeffrey Sachs discuss alternative solutions for Palestine, questioning the viability of a two-state solution and proposing a people's parliament. They delve into international law, accountability, and the need for a shift from state-centric politics towards a more inclusive global governance system.

Harvard professor Robin Bernstein discusses her book on William Freeman, a teenager in a for-profit prison. Explore the intertwined history of Auburn prison, resistance, and the genocidal foundations of prisons. Reflect on innocence, violence, and the transformation to abolitionist views through historical narratives.

Critical political theorists Adom Getachew and Ayça Çubukçu discuss the colonial history of the international system, resistance strategies by marginalized groups, reimagining left internationalism beyond nation-states, challenges of settler colonialism, and promoting global solidarity through non-state-centric organizing and inclusive translations.

Today we talk with Camilla Hawthorne about her recent edited collection, The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity, and its relation to her prior monograph, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean. She explains and elaborates on how Blackness is not singular, but involved in “taking place” in imaginative, resistant, and across many different political terrains, whether it be citizenship, the right to the city, the imagining of futures after environmental collapse, and diverse linguistic, cultural, and musical affiliations across diasporic communities.Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and also serves as program director and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her work addresses the racial politics of migration and citizenship and the insurgent geographies of the Black Mediterranean. Camilla is co-editor of the The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023), and is author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022). In 2020, she was named as one of the national Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera‘s 110 "Women of the Year" for her work on the Black diaspora in Italy. Camilla received her PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018.  

Guests Sherene Seikaly & Andrew Ross discuss organizing National Faculty for Justice in Palestine with 100 chapters in the US. Topics include the growth of pro-Palestinian activism, challenges faced on university campuses, evolution of academic activism, and the importance of collective support and solidarity in resistance movements.

Professors Amahl Bishara and Nayrouz Abu Hatoum discuss Palestinian political expression, fragmentation, and unity. They explore how boundaries impact national identity, cultural commitments, and forms of unity through art, media, and demonstrations. The conversation delves into personal reflections, political struggles within Israel and the West Bank, solidarity among political prisoners, resistance dynamics, witnessing Palestinian death, ecocide in Gaza, and the significance of love, care, and resistance in the Palestinian context.

In January, the University of Michigan Faculty Senate passed a resolution  calling for “the University’s leadership, including the Board of Regents, to divest from its financial holdings in companies that invest in Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza.” The statement highlighted the unprecedented rate of civilian deaths in Gaza, and that American financial sources are central to Israel’s ongoing genocide. Working with Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), the TAHRIR Coalition, and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, and others, the resolution drew on the tradition of activism against South Africa’s apartheid regime, and ongoing anti-racist work.Today we speak with members of the UM faculty, who tell us about the background of the resolution, the work they did to pass it, and the campaigns on campus that are building off its success. Our conversation offers a range of insights that will be useful to campus activists elsewhere.Charlotte Karem Albrecht is an Associate Professor of American Culture and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, where she is also core faculty in the Arab and Muslim American Studies program and affiliated faculty for the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies and the Race, Law, and History Program. Her research interests include Arab American history, histories of gender and sexuality, women of color feminist theory, queer of color critique, and interdisciplinary historicist methods. Her first book, Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling, was published open access with University of California Press. Karem Albrecht holds a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota. Her work has also been published in Arab Studies Quarterly, Gender & History, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and multiple edited collections.Leila Kawar is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where she holds appointments in the Department of American Culture and in the Social Theory and Practice Program. Kawar’s research examines the cultural dimensions of legal practice, focusing on how legal advocacy intersects with the politics of migration, citizenship, and labor. Her first book, Contesting Immigration Policy in Court: Legal Activism and Its Radiating Effects in the United States and France (Cambridge University Press 2015) asks what difference law has made in immigration policymaking in the U.S. and France since the 1970s. Challenging the conventional wisdom that “cause litigation” has little long-term impact unless it produces broad rights-protective principles, the book shows that legal contestation can have important radiating effects by reshaping how political actors approach immigration issues. Her current book project, Conditioning Human Mobility: Rights, Regulation, and the Transnational Construction of the Migrant Worker, is an empirically-grounded study that critically examines international law’s historical and contemporary entanglements with migrant labor recruitment. Kawar is a regular contributor to the Detroit-based socialist journal Against the Current. Derek R. Peterson is Ali Mazrui Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Michigan, and an elected member of the Faculty Senate Assembly.