Email this article Confronting institutional silences: A collective response to genocide and epistemic erasure
Abstract
Across universities in the Global North, institutional resources, silence, and complicity have actively supported Israel’s ongoing settler colonial violence and genocide against Palestinian people. Within this troubling landscape, our small collective of students, faculty, and staff has engaged in deliberate, embodied acts of refusal to disrupt institutionalized silence and presumed neutrality that normalize settler colonial violence. Weaving together personal reflections, observations, and artistic modalities, we chronicle our collective’s effort to disrupt institutional violence perpetuated by the mantle of presumed neutrality on our campus – seeking to disrupt the deafening silence around Palestinian struggles and resistance. We also reflect on the effects and affects around our efforts to bring Palestinian struggles into focus at a small academic conference. The juxtaposition of these interventions helps unmask the larger project of epistemicide perpetuated by the Global North academy – the systematic destruction or suppression of knowledge systems, ways of knowing, and modes of learning, particularly those associated with marginalized or colonized groups. While we recognize pivotal moments that disrupt the silent (and often violent) status quo, we also contend with the complex challenges of solidarity praxis. We offer this paper as an invitation shaped by the tensions, contradictions, and imperfections of doing this work from our implicated positionalities. The practices we describe are fragmentary, situated, and incomplete, but they gesture toward otherwise possibilities: toward worlds where solidarity is not performance but practice, where art is not peripheral but central to resistance, and where knowledge emerges from feeling, relation, and refusal.
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