English & Comparative Literary Studies - Events Calendar

The Warwick Social Theory Centre & ECLS Palestinian Literature and Culture

co-convene

"The Academy in the Age of Utmost Catastrophes and Conjunctural Crises”

 Wednesday, 4 March 2026: 4:00pm-6:00pm (UK), FAB5.49

 Invited speakers:

• Hashem Abushama (Oxford), "Dialectics of Liberation: Palestine at a Conjuncture"
• Abdeljawad Omar (Birzeit), "Palestinian University in the Wake of Genocide"
• Mudasir Amin (Warwick), "Education as Erasure: Mapping the modalities of Indian state's academic repression in Kashmir"
• Louisa Munch (Warwick): "The University against the Banality of Evil: What UK academia can do in the fight against fascism"

Registration required, please. Here is the link: ECLS Palestinian Literature Reading Group - Sign Up

For more information, contact: Nadia.Backleh@warwick.ac.uk

Abstracts & short bios:

•  “Dialectics of Liberation: Palestine at a Conjuncture”, with Hashem Abushama (University of Oxford)

To start from a position that affirms the liberation of the colonized as a facet, or a node, of universal liberation. What does it mean to think Palestine dialectically? In the face of much obfuscation and manufactured obscurity that proliferates about Palestine through legal, cultural, and economic institutions and figures, what can anti-colonial Marxism teach us about such obfuscation and the concretely lived space and time in Palestine? The difficulty of thinking Palestine in this context is the historical conditions, which are neither of our making nor of our choosing, that sediment layers upon layers of censorship and repression to ensure that by the time we speak Palestine, we end up with very little to offer: binaries, repeated mantras, perhaps condemnations, a series of qualifications, a cabinet of risk assessment files, maybe a playlist to soothe the anxieties of those whose oblivion towards the world is threatened by Palestine. Thus, the talk starts from this position: to see Palestinian liberation as intertwined with—indeed central to—universal liberation. It is only then that we are able to begin to grasp the complexities of the current conjuncture--in all its repressions, silences, and its layers upon layers of unspeakable grief.

 Hashem Abushama --

Hashem Abushama is an associate professor of human geography at the University of Oxford’ School of Geography and the Environment. His writings on space and anti-colonial Marxism have appeared and are forthcoming in Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Transactions, Soundings, Antipode, and Radical Philosophy.

•  “Palestinian University in the Wake of Genocide”, with Abdeljawad Omar (Birzeit University)

In the wake of October 7 and the genocidal assault on Gaza, the Palestinian condition has entered a new and devastating phase marked by intensified precarity, fragmentation, and epistemic siege. Across historic Palestine and in the diaspora, Palestinians face unprecedented levels of surveillance, criminalization, and political delegitimization, while simultaneously experiencing the erosion of collective structures capable of sustaining long-term resistance. Within this landscape, the university emerges as a critical site for examining the contradictions of political life under conditions shaped by colonial violence and neoliberal restructuring. Rather than functioning as an incubator of political mobilization, the Palestinian university increasingly operates as a space of demobilization—an institution that, despite its symbolic centrality to national aspirations, struggles to generate sustained collective action. This demobilization is not merely the result of repression, though police infiltration, donor pressures, and punitive disciplinary regimes all intensify post–October 7. It is also the consequence of a deeper institutional transformation in which universities have become bureaucratic, credential-producing machines that channel youth aspirations toward individualized mobility and away from collective struggle. In this sense, the university becomes a site where political imagination is thinned, risk is privatized, and the conditions for organized resistance are structurally weakened. These dynamics are rooted in broader structural and economic pressures: chronic austerity, the fragmentation of the Palestinian political field, and the neoliberalization of the higher education sector. Rising tuition costs, adjunctification, the proliferation of market-driven programs, and the collapse of public funding produce a university environment dominated by debt, competition, and managerial governance. Together, these forces erode the university’s capacity to serve as an oppositional space, transforming it into a depoliticized institution that mirrors the broader crisis of Palestinian collective life under settler colonialism and global neoliberalism. By tracing the multiple dynamics that shape the contemporary university, the lecture offers a symptomatic reading of the Palestinian condition through the lens of higher education, foregrounding the institution’s structural limitations and its persistent political and social pitfalls.

 Abdeljawad Omar --

Abdaljawad Omar is a Palestinian writer based in Ramallah/Al-Bireh. He teaches philosophy and cultural studies at Birzeit University, where his work focuses on settler colonialism, political theory, resistance, and decolonial thought. He writes in Arabic and English and has published widely in international outlets on Palestinian politics and global power structures.

•  Education as Erasure: Mapping the modalities of Indian State’s academic repression in Kashmir”, with Mudasir Amin (University of Warwick)

 This paper aims to examine the state of academic (un)freedom in and over Kashmir by mapping the ways in which the Indian state controls higher educational spaces, curricula, and knowledge production. It is an urgent intervention necessitated by a context of increasing right-wing authoritarianism in India and the ever-expanding surveillance and repression in Kashmir – especially since 2019 following the repeal of Kashmir’s limited autonomy and strengthening of settler colonial practices in the region. The tactics of silencing have entrenched the spectacular and subtle ways of policing of knowledge production in everyday life. The suffocation of alternate epistemes is witnessed alongside the state’s neoliberal vision that claims to make Kashmir “the new axis for knowledge by creating a favourable eco-system for the establishment of state-of-the-art knowledge institutes of national and global repute.”

As recently as August 2025, a government order declared 25 books as forfeit for “propagating false narrative and secessionism”. The book ban forms a continuum in the use of censorship as an organised state policy in the disputed region, that includes repressive targeting of academic freedom whereby dissent is criminalised, academics arrested or terminated from jobs, curriculum revised to remove contested narratives, writings erased from online archives, student politics banned in university spaces, conferences on Kashmir barred, academics’ passports withheld or travel into Kashmir barred. These instances, including tactics of transnational repression and mostly going unreported, have led to a vicious cycle of censorship and self-censorship with academics fearing reprisals to themselves or their families. Framing this regulation of people, sites, and forms of knowledge production and education as erasure, the paper builds on my previous co-authored work interrogating India’s long drawn history of settler colonial erasures in Kashmir (Mushtaq and Amin, 2021), as well as the war on narratives and memory that we frame as “memoricide” (Mushtaq and Amin, 2020; Amin, 2023).

Borrowing from Lisa Bhungalia’s (2023) analysis on the work of the “terrorism” lists in the context of Palestine, the paper will especially focus on the violence of “list-ing” by Indian state in the context of academic (un)freedom over Kashmir – filtering, sorting, and marking bodies and forms of knowledge production to enact newer forms of orders, jurisdictions and targeting for those listed and deemed listable. The secrecy and unpredictability of these lists creates modes of anticipatory violence, enforcing ways of (self) censorship and rendering individuals suspect while evading visibility. The extensive policing, violence and surveillance work that such lists do presents increasing challenges for Kashmiri scholars and allies even as they have continued to resist statist narratives and epistemological erasures to affirm radical possibilities of epistemic transnational solidarity, from Kashmir to Palestine and beyond.

Mudasir Amin --

Mudasir Amin is a visiting research fellow at the University of Warwick. He investigates the politics of humanitarian aid in militarised contexts, with a particular focus on Kashmir. His 2021 co‑authored article in Third World Quarterly entitled “We will memorise our home’: exploring settler colonialism as an interpretive framework for Kashmir” is widely cited for its foundational theoretical contribution on settler colonialism in the region.

• “The University against the Banality of Evil: What UK Academia can do in the fight against fascism”, with Louisa Munch (University of Warwick)

 As fascism grows ever more present in politics across the West today, education remains our first line of defence against its tyrannical strategy and manipulative rhetoric. Higher education remains one of the last spaces reserved for what Hannah Arendt called “dangerous thinking”, in which we can call oppressive systems into question, speak truth to power and engage in vigorous and productive debate. As a vanguard against the “non-thinking” that allows evil to permeate our politics and entire the realm of the banal, higher education must be protected if our democratic values are to prevail. In the words of bell hooks, “education is the practice of freedom” and without our instance on keeping these spaces open, our freedoms are deeply threatened.

Critical thinking and critical pedagogy must be taught and cannot be done alone. Where the humanities stand as means of resistance against the oppressive nature of manufactured ignorance, the fight against fascism must involve an education and pedagogy that resists dominant narratives and aims for the “naming of the world” as Paulo Freire puts it. We must aim for a teaching and learning that is both community based and future focused and that speaks for a solidarity with marginalised groups under threat and stands steadfast in the face of tyranny. In naming the world, only then can we change it and through the discussion of thinkers like Hannah Arendt, bell hooks and Paulo Freire, I argue in this paper for the necessity of the University as a means of defence against fascism and how we may consider reframing the University in its current state of crisis in order to build a better future.

 Louisa Munch --

Louisa Toxværd Munch is a PhD researcher and teacher in English and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick. Her research examines nostalgia, political crisis, and the cultural conditions enabling the contemporary far right. She works across critical theory, literature, pedagogy, and public scholarship.