Hosted by Dalia Mostafa with Tahrir Hamdi, Afaf Jabiri, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Peter Trnka

3 September 2026

17:00–18:30 UK | 19:00–20:30 Palestine

Register here

This 90-minute webinar kicks off a series of events organised by the Academic Action Network for Palestine (ActforPal) that will bring together academics, activists, writers, and students to discuss pertinent and timely topics emerging from the reality of Palestinians who are confronting genocide, dispossession and trauma on a daily basis.

The webinar, hosted by Dr. Dalia Mostafa, will feature one of the most important decolonial voices of the contemporary period, Prof. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, along with Palestinian and other voices from ActforPal to begin a necessary and urgent conversation about why it is crucial to center Palestine in academic and public discourses.

The theme will be further explored in a series of workshops organised by ActforPal scholars, which will serve as a radically free intellectual space to produce new insights and knowledge about what Palestinians are going through inside Palestine and beyond.  

Topics will include epistemic violence during genocide, deconstructing and rearticulating terms and definitions pertaining to the Palestinian struggle, counteracting exclusion and systemic silencing, globalising the Palestinian struggle for liberation and justice, decolonising education in our classrooms and various academic platforms, and the contribution of feminist and anti-colonial critiques to knowledge production and radical pedagogy.

Dalia Said Mostafa teaches in the department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Edinburgh and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Manchester. Her publications include co-authored book The Egyptian Coffeehouse: Culture, Politics and Urban Space (2020), and articles on Palestinian and Lebanese literature and cinema.

Tahrir Hamdi is a professor of anti-colonial and resistance literature and President of Arab Open University in Jordan. She won the Palestine Book Award Counter Current category in 2023 for her book Imagining Palestine and the Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation’s Arab Researchers’ Award in the Humanities in 2020.

Afaf Jabiri is Co-Director of the Centre for Social Justice and Change and a Senior Lecturer at the University of East London, and a Visiting Fellow at LSE. Her research focuses on feminist theory, intersectionality, settler colonialism, and women’s agency in the Arab region, particularly in Palestinian refugee camps, Jordan, Egypt, and Yemen.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a professor at Columbia University. She has written many books and holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Toronto, London, Rovira I Virgili, Rabindra Bharati, San Martin, St. Andrews, Chile, Vincennes-Saint-Denis, Yale, Ghana-Legon, Presidency University, and Oberlin College. Humanities for social justice is her obsession.

Peter Trnka, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University, is editor-in-chief of Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies. Recent publications include “Nuclear Racism, from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Gaza and Iran” and “Disjoint and Multiply: Deleuze and Negri on Time”.