9 MARCH

Support the strike!

SOAS

Day theme: Palestine on the Picket

10am

Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani excerpt reading and discussion [access reading here] (Heba Hayek and Yasmin Elsouda)

11am

From Gaza to You

12pm

Cheche: Reminisces of Student Activism, Radical Publishing and African Liberation (Georgios Hadjivayanis)

1pm - 3.30pm Palestine and Israel @ Gazebo on the Green

SOAS x BDS (SOAS BDS)

A History of the Teachers' Strikes in Palestine (Mezna Qato)

The Oslo Illusion (Adam Hanieh)

Palestinian Refugees and the Right of Return (Rafeef Ziadeh)

Trump's Peace Plan (Hagar Kotef)

Apartheid's Law (Nimer Sultany)

Academic Freedom in Palestine and Beyond (Lori Allen)

Street Texts and Resistance in Late-Ottoman and British-Mandate Jerusalem (Yair Wallach)

The Pain and Pleasure of Teaching and Researching Palestine (Ruba Salih)

4pm

Settler colonialism in Kashmir (Mehroosh Tak)

BIRKBECK

12:30-1:30pm

Waiting to Strike: Waiting as a Political Practice

LOCATION: @ the Perseverance Pub, 63 Lamb's Conduit St

Waiting Times is a Wellcome-funded research project taking place across Birkbeck and the University of Exeter opening up what it means to wait in, and for, healthcare. Our co-primary investigators are Lisa Baraitser and Laura Salisbury. Members of the Waiting Times team will offer a series of short talks inspired by the strikes, exploring the relationship between time, waiting, and political action and change. We’ll conclude with a performance by artist Martin O’Brien, whose durational work explores pain, endurance, and living in what he terms ‘zombie time’ — the time beyond his life expectancy.

Read about us on http://whatareyouwaitingfor.org.uk or on twitter @WhatisWaiting

Buy tickets for Martin O’Brien’s next performance at the ICA on 28 March: https://www.ica.art/live/the-last-breath-society

Order of presentations:

1. ‘Waiting to Strike’ (Michael Flexer, Publicly Engaged Research Fellow, University of Exeter)

2. 'What does time spent on the psychoanalyst’s couch teach us about duration and change?' (Jordan Osserman (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Birkbeck)

3. 'Care'-ful protest: an examination of the affective life of protest, and how affect intersects with inert protests (sit-ins and die-ins) as a motivator for change (Lisa Baraitser, Professor of Psychosocial Theory, Birkbeck) –

4. ‘Grey Time: Waiting for Beckett’: how Beckett’s use of grey helps us to explore the lived qualities of waiting in late modernity. Using Beckett to open up the challenges and possibilities of waiting on picket lines. (Laura Salisbury, Professor in Modern Literature and Medical Humanities, University of Exeter)

5. Martin O’Brien - Performance

5pm

(B)ordering Britain (Dr Nadine El-Enany, Law, Birkbeck)

Nadine will speak about her new book, (B)ordering Britain, in which she argues that British immigration law must be understood in the context of Britain’s imperial history. Against all-too-familiar mythological narratives of Britain’s colonial past, she shows how a retreating imperial power deployed immigration laws to cut itself off physically and symbolically from its colonies and the Commonwealth, taking with it what it had plundered. British immigration laws are acts of colonial seizure and violence, obstructing the vast majority of racialised people from accessing the spoils of empire. (B)ordering Britain makes clear that regardless of what the law, media and politicians dictate, people existing under the weight of colonialism’s legacy of race and racism have every right to come to Britain and take back what is theirs.

5:30pm

#cola4all: Building student-worker power in the University of California system (Dominick Lawton, PhD Candidate in Slavic Studies, former Head Steward of UAW, UC Student Workers Union, 2865)

Teachout on the strike wave by postgrad teaching assistants over a Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) throughout the University of California system in the USA, which started in December at UC Santa Cruz and is now spreading to other campuses. Most recently, 54 graduate student workers were fired and >30 not rehired by UCSC in retaliation for their wildcat strike. What role has the union played in this struggle? What lessons can we apply to UK higher education and the future of universities? Come along to help build international solidarity amongst higher education workers!

6pm

The Shaheen Bagh Women’s Protests – Resisting Fascism in India and Beyond (Dr Kalpana Wilson, Geography, Birkbeck)

As we celebrate International Women’s Week, this teach-out session will explore the women-led continuous sit-in protests taking place in India against the new Islamophobic and fascistic citizenship measures introduced by the Hindu supremacist Narendra Modi government. These measures have been analysed as a significant step towards ethnic cleansing and genocide. What can we learn from the innovative and intersectionally gendered forms of resistance which the overwhelmingly Muslim women of Shaheen Bagh and all the other Shaheen Baghs which have sprung up across India are developing? What can they tell us about resisting fascism and far-right nationalism globally and in Britain? Why is it so important for us in Britain to actively support the resistance to fascism in India, a fascism which is intimately bound up with colonialism and global capital?