My remarks will center on the particular challenges facing junior faculty and faculty of color who wish to engage in activism in and around university settings. As the wave of student protests against racial injustice swept across campuses last year, it was minority faculty and those in area studies who were called upon first to show solidarity with our students. It was these faculty members, those who are often already the most burdened with service responsibilities, who wrote letters of support, met with student groups, liaised with administrators, and stood on the front lines. While our desire to be civically engaged may be genuine, junior faculty, in particular, experience competing demands for our time and energy: We must “publish or perish”; forge relationships with key faculty and staff; and appear to be collegial and committed to the success of the university. Though activism is not inherently at odds with these pre-tenure obligations, a very real tension does exist between them. And junior faculty, working in marginal or politically charged fields, who take up activist causes risk finding themselves cast even further in the role of outsider. Thus, activism may come at a very real cost for untenured or otherwise vulnerable faculty. Even as students speak out, universities have become more watchful of faculty speech. Scholars in area studies have long struggled with balancing politics in the classroom; and the stakes remain high. In recent years, we’ve watched as a number of our peers were publically and painfully censured for their engagement (in the classroom and out) with volatile topics. Again, faculty without the protections of tenure are the most vulnerable to such reprisals. The result of this increasingly stringent atmosphere is a freezing effect on all faculty speech, not only in what we say as private individuals, but in the very topics we choose to raise in our classrooms. My intention is not to dissuade people from joining activism and academia, but to openly and frankly discuss the balancing act faced by junior faculty and/or those of color. How do we appropriately divide our energy? Who can we identify as allies? How do we protect ourselves from censure? Thus, my comments, in combination with those of my more senior co-presenters, are aimed at creating an opportunity for dialogue between junior faculty and those who have successfully combined academics and activism.

Pedagogy of the Depressed: Activism and Teaching in a Depressive State As an Arab-American, I am a racialized professor, walking into a room already coded by American racial politics and history. This space is even denser in its historical and social realities for black, Latino, and Asian-American scholars of the Middle East. Through my participation in this roundtable, I seek to foreground the classroom as a space of social activism that is inseparable from “teaching the Middle East,” especially when one is a racialized subject in North America. In an academic world where Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term has gained common currency, my contribution hopes to push on “intersectionality” inasmuch as to recognize the classroom as an overdetermined political space that always already mobilizes the coterminous markers of ethnicity, race, gender, and class of the faculty and students’ ideological paradigms. It is, therefore, irresponsible of a Middle East scholar of color to ignore the reality that issues of social justice inform our presence and topics in the classroom, especially when we recognize that our presence as scholars of color is perceived as “interlocutors” between the United States and Middle East. Melanie Klein defines the “depressive position” as a mental state that is capable of “holding” simultaneously” the “good” and the “bad” of one’s own external objects, moving beyond the “paranoid-schizoid” state of othering and disavowing “split” objects. This depressive position is the position of teaching the Middle East as a person of color, which critically examines social realities in the Middle East while confronting social injustices also “at home.” I offer the brief example of mobilizing faculty and students to protest against William and Mary’s invitation to Condoleezza Rice to speak at its commencement in 2015. This example demonstrates the difficulties in achieving a “depressive position” that balances political activism with our role as racialized professors of Middle East studies. I begin to flesh out how, cribbing Amilcar Cabral, “the foundations and objectives” of being a Middle East scholar of color must constantly be recognized and positioned “in relation to larger [social] structures” that make the classroom a logical extension of it social context.

“The Indivisibility of Justice: Joining Activism and Academia, Joining Struggles” This intervention is framed by one of the iconic and often repeated phrases of social justice activist, Martin Luther King Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere… Justice is indivisible.” As a conceptual framework, the indivisibility of justice pushes us first to think about how struggles for justice must always be joined together. For King, the struggle for justice is always something that people must join and participate in. Here, I will emphasize the parallel between joining up with activist struggles as an academic and joining activist work together with academic concerns How can activist work take place within the university and academy at large and also what are some of the dynamics we face as professors in working with broader struggles outside universities? I will analyze specific experiences in four major activist contexts connected to the university to discuss joining activism and academia: (1) a large support workers’ strike at my university (2) organizing with students as a professor in the 2012 “printemps erable,” student movement in Québec (3) membership in a Black-focused community-university collective and (4) BDS activism on campus and in professional organizations. My comments will focus on five main areas: (1) tensions between academia’s preference for conceptual and theoretical approaches to justice and social change over practical and action oriented approaches, (2) trying to professionalize work for social justice and having it “count” as part of a professor’s duties, (3) fear of reprisals and repercussions for standing up for controversial issues (4) what it means to be perceived as an “academic expert” in activist spaces (5) the ways in which all of these are informed by specific dynamics of intergenerational work between and among students and faculty, especially how these play out differently for racialized and white faculty and students of different genders.