I entered academia with a certain level of naivete. During my undergraduate studies in Anthropology, I became energized by a discipline I felt was dedicated to knowledge production not for its own sake but as a project of building more just and liberated societies. Universities, by extension, seemed to be bastions of critical dialogue and action in pursuit of these goals. Over time, I realized this was not always true, as my experience in US academia has been marked by consistent, coordinated efforts to suppress the academic freedom of Palestinians and collaborations between US and Palestine-based academics.

In 2014, during my first semester of graduate school, Steven Salaita visited my university to speak about his recent firing from The University of Illinois: Urbana Champagne, allegedly for a series of Tweets he sent during Israel’s bombing of the besieged Gaza Strip. The bombing that summer killed more than 2,000 Palestinians. Salaita, a prolific scholar of settler-colonialism in the US and Palestine, offered a profoundly heartfelt and devastating commentary on the images and narratives out of Gaza he was exposed to at the time he sent the Tweets in question. He also offered thoughts about his personal stakes in Palestinian freedom and the ethics of fairness and criticality that shape his pedagogical and scholarly commitments. To the pro-Israel faculty in the audience, neither Salaita nor the Palestinian suffering he spoke about seemed important or even legible. The Q&A following the talk felt like a trial after the sentencing. One of the first questions was from a pro-Israel faculty member, who dismissively asked, “Do you apologize for what you did?”

The event brought into relief that Salaita was not fired for Tweets so much as for breaking two rules incessantly enforced in US academia. First, Palestinians can only be angry if they are also silent. Second, discussion and analysis of conditions of unfreedom must always remain abstract and separate from the conditions themselves and those living under them. These two rules are regularly deployed to silence and punish critical discussions about Palestine in US academic spaces. So often, when it comes to Palestinians, the subaltern, in fact, cannot speak.

Salaita’s visit was one of the first of many efforts I’ve witnessed or experienced meant to curtail academic freedom around Palestine. I was initially admitted into an anthropology graduate program intending to examine the intersections of tourism and transnational activism in the occupied West Bank. Thus, in the summer of 2015, I enrolled in an Arabic program at Birzeit University and intended to spend the summer conducting exploratory fieldwork. Obtaining IRB approval for preliminary fieldwork was made extremely difficult, as university administration questioned my qualifications for doing this research and eventually called me into an in-person meeting with the review board. My most engraved memory from that meeting was when a board member interrogatively asked me what Israeli state authorities would think about my research. I responded that I didn’t consider this a relevant question. Once again, academic workers had positioned themselves as protectors of the Israeli state at the expense of free inquiry that centers the lives of Palestinians living under settler-colonialism and apartheid.

That summer, I flew to Jordan and made my way to the Israeli-controlled King Hussein border crossing into the West Bank. After stating that I intend to study Arabic at Birzeit, I was held at the border alongside an elderly Palestinian man and some other non-Palestinians who had raised suspicions. We were guarded by teenagers scrolling through their phones and presumably sharing common youthful gossip with machine guns hanging at their sides. After six hours and a series of “interviews” asking me questions about my father’s name, my religion, and why I would study Arabic when I come from a Christian family, I was denied entry. Israeli authorities made up a law to justify my denial, saying that because I was going to study Arabic, I needed to apply for a student visa.

I was extremely eager to pursue language learning at such an important Palestinian institution while building a network of collaboration and exchange with Palestinian colleagues. However, the Israeli state actively works to render such partnerships impossible. The informal policy they used to justify my denial and that of so many others has recently been formalized with new regulations prohibiting international scholars from teaching and working in Palestine.

This policy is a boycott of individual academics meant to cut off Palestine and Palestinians from the rest of the world, deny them opportunities to participate in broader academic communities and prevent the spread of knowledge of Israel’s cruel system of settler-colonial apartheid. At the same time as I was denied entry, and every summer after that, dozens of US university programs offered students opportunities to participate in study abroad programs in Israel and at Israeli universities that perpetuate the invisibility of settler-colonial violence shaping the everyday lives and deaths of Palestinians.

Much of the current opposition erroneously frames the boycott as sanctioning individual Israeli scholars rather than the Israeli academic institutions directly complicit as an accessory to the apartheid reality. Opponents also claim the boycott is an attack on the mission of universities writ large as spaces of fierce critique and speaking truth to power. By sharing a small sample of my experiences, I aim to underline Alireza Doostdar’s ever-pertinent point that critics of the boycott assume that Israeli academics are our colleagues, whereas Palestinian academics are not. Given the vastly unequal treatment of Israeli and Palestinian academia, it is difficult to interpret opposition to the boycott as anything other than a rejection of academic freedom and the continuation of a world that treats Palestinians as exceptionally unworthy of benefiting from the values of critical and collaborative knowledge production US academic institutions and anthropologists in particular claim to hold so dearly.

Anti-Palestinian violence has only accelerated since I first entered academia. At the same time, I see solidarity with Palestinians and a recognition of their experiences as mirrored in global structures of colonial oppression as vastly more prominent among my generation of scholars than that of previous generations. These scholars understand the importance of rejecting the production of disinterested and extractive knowledge and instead apply critical and careful methods of inquiry as world-building tools. This point is essential not only to underscore that, as anthropologists, we can stand on the right side of history amidst a growing intersectional and international movement for Palestinian freedom. By rejecting the call from Palestinian civil society to support their struggle through boycotts, the AAA risks alienating upcoming generations of anthropologists that overwhelmingly acknowledge the importance of learning from and being led by those who bear the brunt of structures of oppression. This could have severe consequences for anthropology’s growth and perhaps survival as an innovative and relevant field of research.

Of course, I worry about what repercussions publicly supporting this vote might have on my prospects for academic jobs in a crumbling market. Academics who speak critically about Israel’s apartheid system are regularly targeted, harassed, fired, and denied opportunities, mainly when they are Palestinian or members of other marginalized groups. However, I don’t want to live in a world where my career was made possible through acquiescence to Palestinians’ unfreedom, academic or otherwise. For me to not stand with Palestine and my Palestinian mentors, peers, students, and the Palestinian refugees exiled in Jordan who allow me to do my research would be nothing short of academic malpractice.

This is why I’m voting “yes” to boycott Israeli academic institutions.

Kyle B. Craig is a Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology and Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern University. His dissertation research examines the intersections of youth temporalities, the affective resonances of urban material, and the politics of public aesthetics via graffiti and street art in Amman, Jordan. 

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Reflecting back on that and what it might mean for Anthropologists to find themselves on television, I thought of the many ways by which our work, our ideas, and even our presentation is often mediated and fit into what the public wants to see or expects to see. There are some moments when things shift and change, but even as those happen, they are often directed by, edited, and then re-presented to the world – and not by us. As an anthropologist who works with and within many distinct and overlapping publics, I thought I might try this venue out when the opportunity presented itself. What would it mean for me to be on TV and how might I react to this negotiation? Was my public anthropology public enough for television media consumption?

I was contacted in early 2017 by Wall-to-Wall, a production company that was interested in filming at the World Heritage site of MohenjoDaro (Pakistan) and they wanted me to work with them on a project for a series entitled, First Civilizations. After a series of long, thoughtful, and hesitant (on my part) discussions, I was won over by the public-ness of this project: this documentary was for PBS (the Public Broadcasting Service). PBS is our public outlet for TV in the United States. It is the only channel that continues to thank “Viewers Like You,” because it depends on all of us to continue to support it alongside the many grants and funding that they receive. I had grown up watching PBS, and was keen on it’s children’s programming for my own child, and so I felt generally good about the whole discussion, except for the explicit lack of control we would have over editing and content.

This lack of control is made explicit so that there is built in protection for the director and editors of the series and their creative and research rigor. We are then, as academics on the “show,” just one part of a larger story they want to tell. In some manner of speaking, it is as if they cite us in person, on film; and so the same way we have no control in the ways that the many worlds may cite us in text, we have little control over what they (directors/editors/etc) may chose to do with our sound and image.

This is simultaneously somewhat liberating, but mostly anxiety producing. There is something unsettling about having ones image and sound captured by another, particularly knowing you have no control over how it might be used. The irony of that statement is not lost on me when I think about the history of Anthropology and what our discipline has done to many around the world in an effort to learn about humanity.

To be honest, public presentations always have a bit of the adrenaline and exhilaration of things being out of ones’ control. My experience with this team was not unlike many of the other public lectures I’ve done in many different locations around the world. I may want to tell them about something specific, but the interest that is shown is in something completely different. And I have had to cater many a talk, and in particular, public/community workshops, to what was being asked of me. When I first started doing such work, the advice I had been given by senior researchers was, “make sure you get what you want out of it.” My experience however, has always proven the opposite. Public lectures, workshops, and meetings, have nothing to do with “what I want” in a research sense. But in terms of my ethics around public research, it is exactly what I want. What I want is to make my discipline, my work, my research more accessible – and what that means is making sure it finds its way into public discourse in responsible forms. It means conducting workshops that address different community’s curiosities around the ancient world and contemporary issues around heritage. Sometimes it might also mean how to teach people how to do research on different topics, how to write policy papers, how to revamp a syllabus, and now apparently it also means being filmed for TV — whatever form it takes, as long as it is informed by my work in Anthropology, I consider it to be part of my larger project as an anthropologist.

Beyond that ongoing ‘project’, what I did get out of it was another visit to one of my favorite ancient cities, another chance to get to know the men who work and live close to the site (see images below), and another chance to demonstrate to the American public (at least those who watch PBS) that there might be a different voice and vision of who does the knowledge sharing on TV.

The episode on Trade, as a part of the First Civilizations series aired May 15th, 2018. It was predictably awkward to see myself on TV, but my students (past and present) loved it. They felt like they were back in my classroom – many of them sent me emails after saying it reminded them of how important learning about anthropology was in their own practice and lives.

I may not agree with all of the ways in which the argument and premise of the show unfolded; I may not agree with all of their editing decisions; but I am glad I did it anyway. If nothing else, the negotiations we have to do with those creating, directing, editing and presenting the many publics we encounter and engage with, has become more clear.

Top image: Author being filmed at MohenjoDaro (image courtesy of Ibad Rahman). Bottom two images: Hanging out in DK-G Area, MohenjoDaro (images taken by author, with permission to publish by all present in image).

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

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