This paper investigates the experiences of graduate students engaged in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. I unpack the intersection of the neoliberal university (Thornton 2012) and the rise of BDS activism on university campuses. First, I highlight how the entrenchment of neoliberal regimes on graduate student education has created particular pressures on graduate students, namely heightened demands to “publish or perish”; significant decreases in institutional funding for graduate education; and an evermore precarious academic job market for aspiring scholars. Second, I provide a detailed genealogy of the rise of the BDS movement since its inception in 2005, with particular attention to its growing prevalence on university campuses. Third, the main contribution of this paper comes in the form of interviews with graduate students who are also BDS activists at universities in North America. I argue that the mechanisms of the neoliberal university – most prominently cuts in basic graduate funding – have forced graduate students to seek out more external sources of funding, including more contract teaching hours, and various bursaries and fellowships. This has also reinforced graduate student dependency on faculty supervisors and dissertation committee members who are increasingly relied upon to vouch for their students’ research projects and credentials as teachers and scholars. My findings suggest that this renewed dependency has created challenging power dynamics for graduate students to navigate, especially those organising around BDS. Many of these students have found that their faculty supervisors are unsupportive of their political activity, and in some instances outwardly hostile towards it and them. I conclude the paper by detailing the strategies and tactics deployed by graduate student activists to mitigate the discomfort, opposition and backlash they experience as BDS organisers. My findings suggest these graduate students/BDS organisers have found success as both scholars and activists through renewed commitments to collective action. This has come in the form of active student and faculty support from across academic disciplines, and the institutionalisation of scholar-activist networks that seek to address threats to academic and political freedom in the age of the neoliberal university. For example, supportive faculty have formed interdisciplinary working groups to support the research and activism of these graduate students. And graduate students engaged in BDS activism have established committees in their student and labour unions with explicit mandates to both advance the BDS campaign, and protect students who experience backlash because of this organising.

The current repression of Palestine work in academia is reflective of a deeply entrenched love between the rapidly privatizing public university and US imperialism. Both academically and in regard to activism, Palestine is a severely repressed field. These institutions leave Palestinian students and scholars particularly vulnerable by promoting and even requiring normalization and hindering the scope of what academic freedom means. This is not disconnected from the state in which we currently live, a state deeply invested in repressing colonized communities of color and sustaining the “war on terror.” This in essence racializes certain bodies in particular ways and reprimands certain bodies that don’t conform to the status quo, literally destroying peoples’ livelihood. Disinvesting from the status quo and shifting what the university means requires structural challenging of what academic institutions and public space looks like. It also requires a reimagining of what social justice and transformative change means in this context. This paper aims to offer commentary on the current state of academic activism on Palestine in relation to Palestinian grassroots organizing and Palestine research. It will offer historical context to the Palestinian struggle and various types of resistance as well as the materiality of the Palestinian condition and repression. By centering the pluralism of Palestinian experience ethnographically, as well as Palestinian aspirations historically, this paper aims to bridge gaps in the post-Oslo vacuum both academically and in activist/organizing spheres. In this regard, this paper aims to trace the relationship between Palestine research and Palestine organizing dialectically. This paper will argue that, while the current surge of academic activism on Palestine is important and groundbreaking, the reference point for this work is not sufficient. As an academic community, we need to do more to sufficiently engage with Palestinians who are mobilizing resistance in all its forms as well as their aspirations, both in Palestine and diasporically. I will draw on my experience as both a Palestinian scholar and community organizer to offer insight on how we can strengthen the connection between both realms. Ultimately, this paper will use a theoretical framework of decolonization and resistance to note the limitations of the current state of Palestine activism and will offer a framework of justice to move toward a more accountable activist current. Not only does this paper offer a lens for more justice-centered accountability, but it also aims to re-envision the structure of the university.

Edward Said’s Orientalism is often invoked as the premier scholarly work to challenge the premise of cultural production as operating independently from the machinations of empire. Yet although Orientalism, as with scores of Said’s other texts, makes reference to the author’s experience as a Palestinian living in exile, its connection to Said’s role in the Association of Arab American University Graduates (AAUG) remains lesser known. With the 1967 Six Day War inaugurating both the consolidation of the US and Israel’s imperial collaborations and a modern phase of essentializing depictions of Arabs and Muslims within the US, identifying and countering key anti-Arab and Islamophobic tropes became a crucial aspect of organizations like the AAUG’s efforts. As demonstrated by scholars like Sarah Gulatieri and Andrew Rubin, Said’s work for the AAUG in this regard reveal the early stages of what would become the driving arguments behind texts such as Orientalism. Struggles over politically driven depictions and representations that were ostensibly external to the academy thus inspired the formation of a new intellectual tradition whose aim was not so much to upset the epistemological foundations of modern cultural production as to reveal their strategic influence. The nature of the backlash to which members of the AAUG and related organizations were subjected for their work is another key component of these phenomena. Relatedly, as scholars and students presently contend with what the legal organization Palestine Legal has referred to as “the Palestine Exception to Free Speech””—which includes officials' attempts to redraw the boundaries of academically "acceptable" speech through policy—the notion of the academy’s insularity from larger geopolitical contingencies is revealed to be a myth. Drawing on a combination of critical and literary sources as well as personal experiences of repression of Palestine organizing at various levels, this presentation argues that the current clampdown on campus pro-Palestine speech and activism is part of a wider context, and that the prospect of institutional toleration of the question of Palestine poses serious implications not only for the individual careers of students and scholars, but the very limits of academic discursive convention.

Professors and students engaged in human rights activism know that movements for divestment and academic boycott of Israel often create a tension between students and faculty on the one hand and powerful academic administrators beholden to outside political forces on the other. Although the political climate is arguably improving, BDS activism takes political courage, and there is no escaping the fact that it does often leave individuals vulnerable to suppression and retaliation. There are a number of protective legal measures that astute activists can and do employ, however, both to prevent and respond to retaliatory administrative action. This paper explores legal protections as well as obstacles to the protection of individual rights for academic activists in American universities. Among those protections are discrimination, whistleblower and retaliation statutes. Many universities also offer contract-based protections through student and faculty handbooks, which can be more effective tools than civil rights statutes because they do not require any proof of mental state. Students and professors should work proactively within their institutions to protect themselves before problems arise by identifying obstacles to the protection of individual rights in their policy handbooks/manuals, and then working collectively to improve democratic protections and shared governance. Professors and students at public universities also have constitutional speech and due process rights that constrain the ability of administrators to retaliate against students and faculty for boycott and divestment. This paper situates all of these legal protections within broader trends in federal civil rights law as well as new legislation designed to frustrate boycott efforts, and discusses how students and faculty, through collective action, can effectively engage with the law.