Please join us for a discussion of Dr. Maya Wind’s new book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso Press), exploring how Israeli institutions of higher education are enlisted in Israel’s settler-colonial project. From campuses strategically built to anchor Israeli territorial expansion and Palestinian dispossession, through tailored degree programs for the military and secret police, to dominant paradigms in academic disciplines subordinating their research agendas to service military rule, Israeli universities are imbricated with the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.
Challenging the widespread understanding of Israeli universities as bastions of democracy, the book shows how Israel’s most vaunted liberal institutions are also sites where colonial expertise is reproduced and where Palestinian critical scholarship, pedagogy, and student dissent are stifled.
WHEN: March 6, 2024. 5:00 – 6:30PM
WHERE: Geography 100, 1984 West Mall, UBC
RSVP is required for attendance. Check in at the door.
Speakers:
Dr. Maya Wind is a scholar of Israeli expertise and militarism. She is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at UBC.
Dr. Jasbir K. Puar is a professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality & Social Justice (GRSJ) at UBC. She is the author of the award-winning books The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), which has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese, and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), available in French and Spanish, re-issued as an expanded version for its 10th anniversary (2017), and forthcoming in Greek and Portuguese. Her articles have been published in journals such as Social Text and South Atlantic Quarterly, mainstream venues such as Al-Jazeera and The Guardian, and translated into more than 15 languages. Puar is also co-author of exhibitions for the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019) and the Sharjah Art Biennial (2023). She is the recipient of the 2019 Kessler Award from the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies (CLAGS) at CUNY, which recognizes lifetime achievement in and impact on queer research and organizing.
Dr. Hugh Gusterson has a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and the Anthropology Department at UBC. Before coming to UBC in 2020, he taught at MIT, George Mason University, George Washington University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is past president of the American Ethnological Society (2016-17) and has served on the executive boards of the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Social Studies of Science. Gusterson’s research and teaching interests center on militarism, the anthropology of science, neoliberalism, ethics, counterinsurgency, securitization, nuclear policy, drones, the polygraph, and drug policy.
Dr. Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, columnist, and the international bestselling author of nine books published in over 35 languages including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything, No Is Not Enough, On Fire, and Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World which was published in September 2023. Her writing has appeared in leading publications around the world, and she is a columnist for The Guardian. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at UBC and the Director of Community Engagement for the Centre for Climate Justice.
Dr. André Elias Mazawi serves as Professor, sociologist of education, in the Department of Educational Studies, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia. He is Affiliate Professor with The Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational Research at the University of Malta, and an Affiliate Researcher with the Équipe de Recherche en Dimensions Internationales de l’Éducation (ERDIE) at the University of Geneva. His academic interests are in the areas of the cultural politics of schooling and higher education, the intersections between colonialism and education, with particular attention to the effects of privatization and geopolitics on schooling and educational policies, school governance, and school-higher education restructuring in the Arab region.
This event is co-sponsored by the department of Anthropology, Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality & Social Justice, the department of Geography, and Middle East Studies, UBC.