Webinar: Teaching Palestine in the Present

The ELSC Director Giovanni Fassina will join a great panel of scholars, researchers and representatives of NGOs at a webinar organised by The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) on “Teaching Palestine in the Present”.

Date: Wednesday, 4 May 2022

Time: 16:00-18:00 (BST)

Location: Online via Zoom

Register here to attend

Régis Debray has spoken, in a famous paragraph, of the constant difficulty of being contemporary with our present. In Europe at least, we have yet to be sufficiently contemporary with our past.

(Perry Anderson, Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, 1976, p. 78)

Who writes Palestinian history, in the present, and down to the present? How is it written and practiced, in and outside Europe, and what for? How has what the Italian revolutionary and intellectual Antonio Gramsci called the ‘war of position’ (an organizational and cultural struggle in the ‘fortresses’ of civil society) been fought from above and below in schools and universities? What are the stakes of the struggle? Who is involved? This panel addresses these questions by examining factors such as the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, transnational Palestinian solidarity, university politics, the firing of academics, publishing, education, academic freedom, pro-Israeli groups and individuals, state power, and Zionism. We will aim to open up a wide-ranging discussion of how the ‘integral politics’ of Palestinian history are playing out amid contested forms of hegemony in the present, while considering how those in Middle East Studies can best intervene.

Chair

Teodora Todorova (Teaching Fellow in Sociology, University of Warwick / Chair, BRISMES Committee on Outreach and Pedagogy)

Discussant

Yara Hawari (Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network)

Speakers

• Mai Abu Moghli (Senior Researcher and a Co-Principle Investigator on an Education in Emergencies Programme at the Centre for Lebanese Studies)
• Tamara Ben-Halim (Co-Director and Founder of MAKAN)
• Nicola Pratt (Professor, International Politics of the Middle East, University of Warwick / BRISMES Committee on Academic Freedom)
• Giovanni Fassina (Programme Director, European Legal Support Centre – ELSC)
• Martin Konečný (Director, European Middle East Project – EuMEP) 
• John Chalcraft (Professor of Middle East History and Politics, London School of Economics / BRISMES Secretary / Director of BRISMES Campaigns).