I've been working alongside German academics for the past 5 months, and I have to say that the vast majority are so silent on their state's complicity and active support of what the ICJ deems to plausibly be a genocide, that I will never take their scholarship seriously again.
as Gaza's universities are being destroyed, I remember a conversion where I suggested reviewing Haidar Eid's book for a journal. my colleagues' reaction: there are universities in Gaza?! - academia's silence: you can't be disturbed by the destruction of what you refused to see.
I've been working alongside German academics for the past 5 months, and I have to say that the vast majority are so silent on their state's complicity and active support of what the ICJ deems to plausibly be a genocide, that I will never take their scholarship seriously again.
visa regimes, academia, and seasonal greetings: I'm compiling a list of what conference organizers should be doing to support and ensure participation of non-fancy passport holders - please share!!!
the actions of "Freie" Universität (tm) demonstrate a lot of what is wrong with (German) academia: the stupid and dangerous insistence on apolitical scholarship and civility as more important than integrity.
this line of argument would have failed any student of international law in an exam, there is no logical conclusion that leads from statement a to statement b.
Today starts the hearing in front of the
#ICJ
in the case of Nicaragua vs. Germany. Germany advocates international law & supports the ICJ. This is also why we reject all allegations Germany could be violating the Genocide Convention or international humanitarian law. 1/2
I love how everyone is now a Palestine expert (but where are the isis and Iraq and covid experts, wallah we miss you guys) - and when you get bored, we still here, we still resist, we still die, we write, speak, live, breath. after the special issues and last Skies ♥️
following
@hahauenstein
doing research in Palestine, important work btw, read it. also: barred from going home, doing this work, travel freely in this land, being heard. please ask: who gets to die/ is harassed? who gets to write about it?
and the absurdity of the keywords, none of them make sense, and the length people go to avoid the word "Palestine" (just discovered this fuck up): Sudanese dead or Gazan dead, it's all the same to you - the many levels of erasure.
all 12 universities in Gaza have been targeted and / or destroyed - hello german universities: where are your statements in solidarity with our colleagues? Hello german scholars where are your demands towards your employers?
shout out to the editors of this
@KohlJournal
special issue on anticolonial feminist imaginaries - If you need to know (and you do) how excellent, thorough, kind, attentive editing works, learn from
@saramsalem
,
@AlinaSajed
,
@feministswrite
- full issue:
"these are our colleagues and we're mourning them and they're irreplaceable" ..
@meznaqato
about archivists/librarians in Gaza.. we have to remember it began with building not with destruction.
listening to
@ProfSrilaRoy
speaking
@TheQueerAsia
! the skill and eloquence of putting so much 'stuff' into such a short frame of time. mode: watch and learn.
Berlin Neukölln: as of today will distribute brochures in schools denying that the Nakba happened.
Germany continues to erase Palestinians and to harass school children.
In Neuköllner Schulen wird nun die Broschüre "Mythos Israel 1948" verteilt. Die Broschüre leugnet die Vertreibungen der Nakba, in deren Rahmen meine Familie Anfang 48 vertrieben wurde, und verharmlost den israelischen Siedlungsbau und dämonisiert jene, die ihn kritisieren.
the best compliment is when your first (extremely brilliant) MA student is teaching her first uni class and asks for advice on teaching because they loved your class 💜💜.
broke the family chat by calling out racism and homophobia. it would seem I'm "too sensitive and overreacting". Lulululu, bring on 2022! What's your "achievement" of the day?
my grandmother attended my lecture "against maps/countering cartography" and declared that google is a spy to the whole room during Q&A - no doubts who's granddaughter i am 😂❤️تاتا
as our colleagues, friends, families in Gaza are being killed, colleagues in western unis seem to think of genocide as a stimulating backdrop for debate - fuck your lecture, edited volume, and audacity to demand Palestinians prove their humanity for your intellectual pleasure.
the weird German obsession to tell you about their amazing tel aviv beach holiday when they find out you're palestinian... and then stare at you expectantly. like, what do you want me to do? evaporate? transform into a unicorn?
my very first MA student just submitted her thesis! N. is one of the smartest humans i know and i continue to learn so much from her generous soul and badass brains 💜 sometimes academia is cool like that :)
Happy to share my latest article with
@POMEPS
on 'Supporting plausible acts of genocide: Red lines and the failure of German Middle Eastern Studies'.
It's part of a POMEPS SI on 'The War on Gaza and Middle East Political Science'.
dear germans, please just spell my name they way I spell it and don't lecture me in Arabic Grammer. 1) you will loose this argument, 2) names are really not grammar exercises for your vhs course, 3) copy paste is your friend, 4) wallah.
I have been told many times over the past years, and especially months, that I am emotionally too invested by my academic colleagues. And while academia is a job and not a life purpose, having a heart and emotions makes me, makes us all, better academics, with better analyses.
If you had any doubts about how zero fucks international diplomats give about Palestinian lives: read today's condolences. stfu. Where were you in the past 6!!! months?! Same for coward academics. Get out of my face with your fake tears.
my friend just told me about the daily changing prices of chicken feed vs sheep feed in Gaza, that he buys for his family to make bread. (Yes, you've all heard that before). So:
Fuck your neutrality, manners and pseudo scientific language without curses. Seriously, fuck you.
I saw a video of a dog eating the remains of a killed Palestinian in Gaza.
I wish I had vocabulary for this, simultaneously I refuse to ever find it. words are useless.
this takes so much time/energy.
every person w/a global north passport should offer support for their "shitty passport" colleagues. Really. And fancy keynote people: tell the conference, you're not coming unless they personally contact the embassies in the researched countries!!
German universities still using "Dienstherr" to refer to themselves in contracts really tells you everything about their feudal mindset.
every professor leads their own little feuding kingdom/lordship with academic staff as knights and peasants.
tell a german institution they misspelled your name and they'll explain to you how in their arabic class in college they learnt that the way I spell my name is incorrect. According to grammar. and they refuse to fix it.
thoroughly enjoying to watch German fascists discuss the deportation options for "Germans with migration background". this is great, at least I know I wasn't paranoid.
and so then you spend anxious hours crafting the perfect email... and the professor's response is: "ya, k - sent from my iphone". and you be like.. bUT whAt aBouT the OTHeR Questions.... ??? and cries silently with self doubt. Academia.
How to write an email to a professor*, a thread:
*faculty members, staff, administrators, and other professional workers at a university are likely older than you, some quite a bit older. Most of us still think of emails as if they were letters, at least the first one you send.
during a junior research fellowship after my BA a professor sexually harassed me (= what former US president referred to as "grab them by the pussy"). He threatened me about speaking up and I didn't then. This professor is still part of your academic staff
@McDanielCollege
.
papers work jo style
office 1: go to office 2
office 2: take this paper to office 1
office 1: *stamps* take it back to office 2 for signiture
office 2: *signs* take this to office 1 and pay a receipt and then come back.
office 1: *more stamps*
office 2: we on coffee break now.
For the forthcoming CATS issue we are looking for photos of Arab authors + cats for our "gallery" feature.
If you have such photos we would be so delighted. (If you know who to contact about permissions, even better.)
Share w/us: info
@arablit
.org.
so the secret to being treated like a human (aka man) in amman is driving an old manual car and sticking your arm out of the window. alright then. Performance time.
sharing my work terrifies me - so in aiming to desensitize myself to the terror: I wrote about protests in Jordan and
@rosaluxstiftung
included it in their publication on West Asia:
Die hier vorliegende Sammlung von Interviews, Kurzanalysen und Berichten ist der Versuch, die Vielschichtigkeit der breiten
#Protestbewegungen
in
#Westasien
zu zeigen und ihre lautstarken Forderungen nach Veränderung zu übersetzen.
men thanking their wives in the acknowledgements of 'their' books for editing, correcting, writing sections, improving arguments, literature research, analyzing sources, etc... Dude, that's called a co-author and should've been put on the cover of the book you wrote together.
"no civilian was killed"
- and German news outlets still broadcast IDF dispatches like it's actual news.
when the propaganda is blatant lies, so blatant, actually, you don't need to fact check.
Amazing battlefield achievement.
The IDF has just completed a 2 week operation on a Hamas command center that Hamas embedded within the Shifa Medical Center.
Hamas used staff and patients as human shields in order to cause maximum civilian casualties as to create more
is it normal for an adult man (aka professor) to throw a tantrum as a reaction to suggesting to include Spivak and Said into a pol theory syllabus and adjust the examination questions?
I mean.. I thought this is standard now.. habibi I can suggest other things too 🙃
are jordanian men also required to tell every state employee if they are single or married before they agree to process any sort of paper or procedure? ... rhetorical question.
I love emails directed at "dear brother Hanna" or "Hello Mr. Prof. Hanna", especially, i am always amazed if not surprised, at how much more respect brother and Mr. Hanna get in contrast to just me, not a dude.
me: trying to finish an article
laptop: naaa, lol no. too hot.
laptop now chilling in the fridge.
me a bit disappointed I don't fit to join it. - at least once a day.
german academia asking you to teach a course at their uni and then be like, oh but first we need your birth certificate... dude, I'm right here, I assure you I was born.
bell hooks wrote about love. and anti-racism. they depend on each other. they are choices, verbs, action words. but you choose both of them. they don't work in isolation. 🌈💜🔥
German academics, six months into genocidal warfare: "In den letzten Monaten ist Deutschland zum Zeugen, wenn nicht sogar zum Mitschuldigen dessen geworden, was nach Einschätzung vieler auf Kriegsverbrechen gegen die palästinensische Bevölkerung in Gaza hinausläuft" ...
anti-racist training courses should be mandatory for university students and staff. why am I expected to work and exist in spaces that are toxic as fuck, and do the work for free that white colleagues persistently fail to do. I am tired.
a white us-american professor once told me i am not 'authentic' to my neighborhood since I speak english and have a foreign uni education. lol. hence she can't include me in her study about said popular neighborhood. bitch, stay away from me. who told you I wanna be studied?!
Europe's second favorite plaything in the middle east (tm) is beating up people, again. but that's cool, as long as imperial interests are being safeguarded. 🤡 jo, Annalena wo ist deine feministische außenpolitik, wenn wir verprügelt werden?
lol, Hauptsache ihr chillt in Aqaba.
"diplomats are not required to bring a negative PCR test result from the country of departure"... because the virus checks your passport and goes .. "eewe yuck, diplomat"?!
fanon used metaphors, sure. but when he writes about violence and decolonization. he means that decolonization is the undoing of colonial violence. and it will be bloody. it's not cute. it's not pure deliberation.
I have a colleague who does not want to include edward said in the options for student's term papers, because that's "too complicated and students have never heard about it". habermas and marx and derrida are fine though.
honestly ... anxiety created by academia is beyond adequate or healthy. NOTHING we do is this urgent, people. you are not a paramedic. You in are not in an OR. Even if some texts make you feel that way: it's not an open heart surgery. **
my first polsci lecture was by Deppe, one of the few professors who's first reaction to me wasn't asking if I'm a terrorist. instead he was curious about the palestinian left, which he admitted to be ignorant about. listen to profs who can admit this!
@BartalYossi
Also the never ending list of things you apparently "das kann man in Deutschland einfach nicht sagen, verstehst du?" (Nee verstehe ich nicht). Followed by in dtl ist Meinungsfreiheit, du bist schon dankbar dass du hier sein darfst, ja?!!