Palestine calls us to new practices and new theories of academic freedom. 

This call is a global one, but it echoes in varied, sometimes incommensurate ways. Academic freedom is often understood as an individual right exercised within stable institutions—whereas Palestine/Gaza forces us to consider the material and collective conditions that make teaching, learning, and knowledge production possible. This seminar seeks to bring together some of the ways that Palestinian liberation is reshaping academic freedom today—both within Palestine and at institutions around the world. These settings are radically unequal and cannot be collapsed into equivalence, but they are linked through structures of militarisation, surveillance, censorship, and institutional discipline.

Co-organizer Ahmed Kamal Junina has been on the ground in Gaza in recent years and, together with his students and colleagues, has been engaged in the daily labor of reimagining academic freedom. This seminar is an invitation to join him. We aim to learn from Palestinian scholars and educators. At a juncture when academic freedom is in polycrisis, how might we rethink academic freedom in and with Palestine?

More detail: In Palestine, scholars and teachers continue to show that academic freedom is not only a legal entitlement but a lived practice of resistance and improvisation. Long a target of Zionism’s violence, Palestinian education has been under unprecedented assault since October 2023. But even under conditions of scholasticide, institutions and educators are developing new means to teach, learn, and create knowledge collectively. “Education is not just a means of imparting knowledge,” wrote a group of Gaza’s academics in an open letter in May 2024. “It is a vital pillar of our existence and a beacon of hope for the Palestinian people.” Despite the magnitude of Israel’s ongoing assault, Palestinians continue to reinvent academic freedom in Palestine and to live out how and why it matters. What are these insights? How can others learn from and support Palestinian education?

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, knowledge of Palestine and solidarity with Palestinians have been met with academic censorship, retaliation, and suppression. At the same time, universities, institutes, and learned societies have played a role in hosting Palestinian scholars and sustaining diasporic networks of expertise. Academic environments have fomented pro-Palestine organizing, but they have also co-opted it and punished it. Huda Fakhreddine has recently challenged the framework of academic freedom: “What use are freedoms and our critical thoughts in a closed room when, at the same time, children are being massacred and starved, and an entire culture vilified and reduced to rubble?” In the face of this and other challenges, what might it mean to rethink academic freedom in and with Palestine now?