In a week when the ambassadors of Georgia and Ukraine have made a blundering effort to interfere with the work of a highly regarded Dublin City University professor of international relations, Donnacha O Beachain, it's nice to have an event to celebrate academic and scholarly vigilance. In May 2020, Ronit Lentin, David Landy and I published Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel, a collection of essays by divers hands built in particular around the ways that the Israel lobby or Israel itself has sought to foreclose on dissent and boycott advocacy, frequently veiling such efforts with references to the need to protect academic freedom.
On Thursday April 22, at 7pm, we are holding an online seminar to celebrate the book and its contributors. Three of our colleagues - Arianne Shahvisi, John Reynolds and Yara Hawari - will speak on their work and there will be time for questions and discussion. Everyone is welcome!
Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel
Edited by David Landy, Ronit Lentin, and Conor McCarthy
Situates the academic boycott of Israel in the broader context of academic freedom
Academic freedom is under siege, as our universities become the sites of increasingly fraught battles over freedom of speech. While much of the public debate has focussed on ‘no platforming’ by students, this overlooks the far graver threat posed by concerted efforts to silence the critical voices of both academics and students, through the use of bureaucracy, legal threats and online harassment. Such tactics have conspicuously been used, with particularly virulent effect, in an attempt to silence academic criticism of Israel.
This collection uses the controversies surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a means of exploring the limits placed on academic freedom in a variety of different national contexts. It looks at how the increased neoliberalisation of higher education has shaped the current climate, and considers how academics and their universities should respond to these new threats. Bringing together new and established scholars from Palestine and the wider Middle East as well as the US and Europe, Enforcing Silence shows us how we can and must defend our universities as places for critical thinking and free expression.
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