Palestine. A Talk Series and Study Group: Activism and Academic Repression

Eastern Standard Time

Activism and Academic Repression with Dylan Rodriquez and Loubna Qutami

Register Here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_v1nglY8YRWyDHsTTf3NFNA#/registr...

Dylan Rodríguez is the 2020-2021 President of the American Studies Association and a Professor at the University of California, Riverside. He is completing his second term as the faculty-elected Chair of the UC Riverside Academic Senate (2016-2020). After completing his Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley in 2001, Dylan spent the first sixteen years of his career in the Department of Ethnic Studies, serving as Chair from 2009-2016. He joined the Department of Media and Cultural Studies in 2017.

Dylan’s thinking, writing, teaching, and scholarly activist work examine how historical regimes and logics of racial and racial-colonial violence become normalized features of everyday state, cultural, and social formations. He is especially concerned with how liberal and progressive reformist appropriations of radical, abolitionist, anti-colonialist and decolonial, and revolutionary struggles reinstitute racial-colonial power while also reproducing systemic anti-Black, carceral, and colonial violence. His work raises the question of how insurgent communities of people inhabit these oppressive regimes and logics in ways that enable the collective genius of rebellion, survival, and radical futurity. What forms of shared creativity emerge from conditions of duress, and how do these insurgencies envision—and practice—transformations of power and community?

In addition to being a proud co-editor of the field-shaping anthology Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2016), Dylan is the author of two books: Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). His next book, White Reconstruction, will be published by Fordham University Press in 2020 and will be followed in 2021 by White Reconstruction II. Dylan’s scholarly writing and public intellectual work have appeared in a wide cross-section of scholarly and popular venues, including Social Text, American Quarterly, Radical History Review, Colorlines, and Scholar & Feminist Online. He has served as an editor or editorial board member for numerous journals and presses, including the University of California Press, American Quarterly, Journal of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, and the recently founded Abolition: a Journal of Insurgent Politics.

Dylan was a founding member of the abolitionist organization Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex and the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, and has worked in and alongside various social movements and activist collectives. In addition to serving as a keynote or plenary speaker in national and international settings, he has enjoyed participating in a wide variety of broadcast media venues, including programs hosted by Huffington Post Live, The Real News Network, and radio stations in Los Angeles, New York City, the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area, Montreal, and Santa Barbara.

Loubna Qutami is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Qutami is a former President’s Postdoctoral Fellow from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (2018-2020) and received her PhD from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside (2018). Qutami’s research examines transnational Palestinian youth movements after the 1993 Oslo Accords through the 2011 Arab Uprisings. Her work is based on scholar-activist ethnographic research methods. Qutami’s broader scholarly interests include Palestine, critical refugee studies, the racialization of Arab/Muslim communities in the U.S., settler-colonialism, youth movements, transnationalism and indigenous and Third World Feminism.