Notes from the editorial collective

Abstract

We write this introduction as students across university and college campuses in the United States and globally continue to demand an end to the US-backed Israeli occupation and genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. These revolutionary movements, which have grown with support across campuses over the last 2 months, have urged a global reckoning on the complicity of liberal and elite educational institutions in supporting ongoing forms of settler colonialism and state violence.Students' demands have been met with administration-backed carceral responses. These include bringing in state and local police to campus, the lack of protection from physical assaults carried out by Zionists, as seen at UCLA, police clearings and raids of encampments on the campuses of Columbia, UC San Diego, UVA, University of New Hampshire, and the University of Chicago. The swift and violent assaults and punishments of students, faculty, and staff alike for speaking out against the Israeli state and in support of Palestinians' right to return and right to live, and against the current bombings of Rafah have been shocking. Other student-led movements, such as those from Rutgers University, Brown University, and Northwestern University, have been met with administration agreements for students to request information on financial disclosures and to support financial and educational scholarship support of Palestinian students to study at their institutions. But these small and few gestures of humanity and repair have been the exception, and as we write, university and college students continue to face actual and evidenced risk of police and carceral violence, while over 35,000 Palestinians have been killed in just 224 days.It is a horrifying time to be a university student or teacher-scholar, and yet, not exceptional. Ten years ago, Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira wrote in the introduction to their edited volume, The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent: "the imperial university … produces what we call 'manifest knowledges'-what is, and what can be, known about histories of genocide, warfare, enslavement, and social death and what are manifestly insurgent truths" (2014, p. 30). What students' mobilizations of tomorrow, this week, next week, and the months to follow will bring forward from their university administrations is unclear; but what remains clear is this: Students have built and cultivated a strong and courageous gesture of coalitional solidarity with Palestinians to demand an end to Israeli occupation in the face of carceral collusion and US-backed settler colonialism.Each article in this issue provides unique and timely insight into this urgent political moment, by reminding scholars to remain ethnographically and ethically attuned to the contexts in which communities cultivate care, commoning, and spaces of dissent in the face of border imperialism, authoritarian politics, and neoliberal labor regimes. Cati Coe, conducting research in Ghana, troubles former and binary frames of the gift economy through her...