Join Students for Justice in Palestine for a conversation with Professors Steven Salaita and Katherine Franke, moderated by Professor Corey Robin, about Academic Freedom in the context of conversations about Palestine/Israel and the constant push by Zionists to silence academic discourse relating to the Palestinian struggle and criticisms of Israel. 

Co-sponsored by: 
Brooklyn College Political Science Department
Brooklyn College Sociology Department
Brooklyn College Secondary Education Department
Brooklyn College Philosophy Department
Brooklyn College Puerto Rican and Latino Studies Department
The Shirley Chisholm Project
Brooklyn For Peace
Jewish Voice for Peace NY-Chapter
International Socialist Organization (ISO)

*“Co-sponsorship does not imply agreement with, or support of, views expressed at a student-hosted event.”

Thursday, November 20, 2014 
6PM to 8:30PM
Doors open at 5:30pm!
Event will start promptly at 6pm. 
BC Student Center - 6th Floor - GOLD ROOM
Refreshments will be served!


OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!! ALL MUST RSVP BELOW - http://SJP1120.eventbrite.com/

Event Description:
On 1 August, Professor Steven Salaita was fired from a tenured position at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign less than a month before he was scheduled to teach his first class there. He had resigned from his tenured position at Virginia Tech, rented out his home in Blacksburg, Virginia for the year, and was finalizing the purchase of a condo in Illinois. A Palestinian-American who writes regularly for The Electronic Intifada, Salon, and other popular media outlets, Salaita is also a respected professor of literature and Indigenous Studies, the author of numerous academic books and essays, and by all accounts, a beloved teacher.

Like all candidates for tenured positions, Salaita had gone through a rigorous hiring process by faculty before being offered the job at UIUC in October 2013.

But beginning on 21 July, the UIUC Chancellor, Phyllis Wise, began receiving a steady stream of emails from wealthy donors to the University protesting the hiring of Steven Salaita. They were opposed to Salaita because of his ardent positions on Palestine and Zionism--ostensibly because of his unrepentant and forceful denunciation of Israel’s 51-day assault on Gaza as communicated via Twitter--and threatened to withhold their largesse if Salaita joined the faculty.

Baher Azmy, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights who has represented Salaita since he was fired, told Alternet that the lawsuit they are now putting together will rest on two claims: one, that the University officials deprived Salaita of his First Amendment rights to to speak on a matter of public concern; and two, that the University unlawfully terminated a contract, which had the guarantees of lifetime tenure.

About the Speakers:
Steven Salaita is an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. He is the author of six books and writes frequently about Arab Americans, Palestine, Indigenous Peoples, and decolonization. His current book project is entitled Images of Arabs and Muslims in the Age of Obama.

Katherine Franke is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where she directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. She was awarded a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, and is among the nation's leading scholars in the area of feminism, sexuality and race. In addition to her scholarly writing on sexual harassment, gender equality, sexual rights, and racial history, Franke is also on the Executive Committee for Columbia's Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Center for Palestine Studies and teaches at a medium security women's prison in Manhattan.

About the Moderator:
Corey Robin is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea and The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Social Research, the London Review of Books, Harper’s, The New York Times and The Nation.

Students for Justice in Palestine and allies at Brooklyn College are excited and proud to announce the opening of a great art exhibition "Boycott! The Art of Economic Activism Exhibit."

This exhibition uses powerful posters to demonstrate the effectiveness of boycotts as a nonviolent tactic to end injustice and oppression. Come learn about the rich history of boycotts in many social movements.

Dates: Sept 29th - Oct 3rd
Every day during common hours 12-2pm
Brooklyn College Student Center SUBO

MONDAY Sept 29th - Bedford Lounge 2nd floor
TUESDAY Sept 30th - Club Room (lower level)
WEDNESDAY Oct 1st - Maroon Room 6th floor
THURSDAY Oct 2nd - Bedford Lounge 2nd floor
FRIDAY Oct 3rd - Bedford Lounge 2nd floor

Everyone is welcome!!!
Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/860982040580281/

About the Exhibition
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) have created a traveling poster exhibition highlighting diverse historical boycott movements from the 1950s to the present. "Boycott! The Art of Economic Activism," features 58 posters from more than 20 boycotts, including the Montgomery Bus Boycott, United Farm Workers' grape and lettuce boycott, divestment from South Africa to protest Apartheid, boycotts of corporations using sweatshops, the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS), and many others.

Activists and solidarity groups have often responded to injustices by implementing boycott and divestment campaigns targeting companies and governments that support and sustain these injustices- and posters have been a primary tool for educating about the issues and inspiring people to action.

http://afsc.org/boycott/

Dear Students, Allies, and Friends,

We are excited to announce that the 2014 National Students for Justice in Palestine Conference will take place on October 24-26th at Tufts University! This year’s conference is themed Beyond Solidarity: Resisting Racism and Colonialism from the U.S. to Palestine.

At last year’s conference at Stanford University, From Margin to Center: Connecting Struggles, Forging a National Movement, we concluded with a panel on joint struggle. The term “joint struggle” represents the work of acting together to resist the systems that oppress our respective communities–sometimes in ways that overlap and other times in ways that are very specific.

Joint struggle means that a victory for one group should also strengthen and advance the movements we are connected with. It comes from an understanding that oppression will never cease to exist for a group unless all oppressed groups are free. For the members of the National SJP steering committee, we have appreciated the solidarity we have received nationally from groups like MEChA and Anakbayan, and we hope to build on both new and existing relationships.

The summer’s events in Palestine and across the U.S., specifically in Ferguson, have clearly shown the connections between racist and colonial oppression in both locations, sparking transnational solidarity and consciousness raising. It is in the spirit of forming a stronger global movement to liberate all peoples that we dedicate this year’s conference to not only strengthening solidarity, but moving from expressing it with words to expressing it by committing to self-education and concrete joint action.

In addition to the theme described above, this year’s conference will focus on building our movement through political and skills development, as well as critical discussions about our work and role in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. The 2014 National SJP Conference will aim to achieve the following goals:

1. This conference will highlight building joint struggle by providing space to learn directly from other national grassroots movements on concrete and intentional actions that we can take to advance all struggles. We will focus on anti-black racism, the ongoing colonization and occupation of indigenous lands and peoples, and the violence against Black, indigenous and migrant people in the U.S. by deepening ties with those who are already organizing against such oppressive forces. This will tie into a focus on militarism as a transnational problem, which arises from collaboration of police, military and intelligence organizations. We will discuss how we can support national movement building emerging out of Ferguson, as resisting militarism becomes a transnational conversation.
2. This conference will delve into why and how the struggle for Palestine is a feminist issue. We will further understand how settler colonialism is racialized and gendered and disproportionately affects women and children. We will also look into the increased violence against Palestinian women and women refugees and migrants in Israel.
3. This conference will create a space for critical discussion on confronting all forms of racism within our movement through reflection, self-accountability and movement accountability. We will also focus on continuing to combat all forms of Judeophobia/anti-Semitism and conflation of Zionism with Judaism.
4. This conference will focus on confronting Islamophobic and Western liberal responses to resistance in Palestine, which relegate Palestinians and their allies to the position of the “non-human Other.” We will discuss how these responses contribute to the dominant Western narrative of the Orientalist discourse, specifically how it impacts our movement and how to resist delegitimation efforts.
5. This conference will help break down the term “decolonization” from a “sexy” social justice buzzword to a lived, feasible experience and practice. We will work to define what colonization and decolonization mean, and what it means to decolonize oneself and the movement.
6. This conference will give students the opportunity to discuss and organize around ways to resist institutional and administrative censorship of Palestine solidarity organizers and Muslim and Arab students on campus, who are often targeted and silenced.
7. This conference will provide the necessary knowledge and tools to counter efforts by Zionist organizations to normalize and whitewash the Israeli occupation as a means of undermining student groups organizing on campus around Palestinian rights.
8. This conference will delve deeper into the successes and failures of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns locally and nationally; in addition to sharing resources and best practices in order to strengthen the effectiveness of the movement.

In the coming weeks, we will provide further information about conference logistics and registration. For now, we ask that local SJP chapters, and other Palestine solidarity groups, begin to make plans to attend the conference. We also ask supporters to kindly consider making a donation to support student travel, so that lack of resources does not stop activists across the country from attending the conference and sharing their knowledge and skills.

We hope to see you at Tufts!

In solidarity,

The National Students for Justice in Palestine Steering Committee