By Mays Ishnaiwer and Dalia Mostafa

At a webinar by the ActforPal on 3 September 2026, internationally recognised speakers from diverse interdisciplinary fields of study addressed the crucial question that occupies many Palestinians and academics concerned with voice and visibility: What does it mean to centre Palestine and Palestinian voices in academic and public discourse?  

The webinar, hosted by ActforPal member and teaching fellow at the University of Edinburgh Dr. Dalia Mostafa, began with a short intervention by Dr. Afaf Jabiri, co-founder of ActforPal and senior lecturer at the University of East London, who emphasised that centring Palestine is not only about centring Palestinian voices but also about situating these voices in their historical and political contexts whilst recognising that there is no single Palestinian voice but countless experiences, histories and trajectories. As she said, “The location changes, the political circumstances change but the continuity of displacement, dispossession and uncertainty remain.” For Jabiri, this means it is crucial to keep in mind how all of these experiences produce what we call the Palestinian condition (al-hala al-falastiniyya).

Tahrir Hamdi, also an ActforPal co-founder and Professor at the Arab Open University in Jordan, underscored that to centre Palestine and Palestinian voices is to stand against empire and all its powerful machinery. In other words, she noted, the Palestinian struggle should not be treated in isolation but as integral to the global struggle against colonisation, indigenous dispossession and the theft of people’s lands and natural resources. “Centring Palestine means dismantling the very terms and structures of knowledge production produced by Western and Zionist settler colonialism. We must begin with Palestine as a centre of knowledge production.” In fact, to centre Palestine is to stand in solidarity with Palestinian agency actively and support resistance in all its dimensions (cultural, political, economic and armed), including the ability to imagine a free, democratic Palestine from the river to the sea.

Dr. Dalia Mostafa reflected from a feminist viewpoint on the use of language and terminology in the context of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. For her, centring Palestine and Palestinian voices lies in articulating new linguistic expressions, terms, concepts and meanings based on Palestinians’ lived experiences during the genocide, defined in their own words and expressing their emotions. She said, “The Palestinian voice has the capacity to fuel the imagination, to revolutionise both language and emotion, shaping and reshaping meanings, poetry, stories and songs.”

Dr. Peter Trnka, an ActforPal member and an associate professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, explained that as an academic, an activist and editor-in-chief of the journal Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies, centring Palestine means ensuring that Palestinian voices are heard whilst removing obstacles to publishing their work on Palestine. Trnka provided examples of the substantial contribution of Palestinian authors to the journal and called for incorporating Palestinian voices in course curricula, journals and magazines. For him, to centre Palestine is “to love, to care for, to protect, to hear and actively listen, to give space and room, too, to imagine, to learn from, be open to, collaborate, promote, negotiate and build a network with Palestinians.”

Eminent postcolonial scholar and activist Professor Gayatri C. Spivak from Columbia University responded to these interventions, underlining that her response comes from the position of an ‘outsider’ and yet carries with it commitment and responsibility to act. She talked about her friendship with the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said and noted that her commitment to the Palestinian struggle started much earlier than the publication of Said’s Orientalism: “Said would scold us if we didn’t do enough and this is the experience actually that moved me into the Palestinian struggle.” For her, she said, centring Palestine is much about connecting with love and passion, alluding to the intellectual Antonio Gramsci in his emphasis that politics cannot be done without this passion, “without this sentimental connection between intellectuals and people.” Humanity is not only about the production of knowledge but it is about the practice of learning: “In order to survive, we must feel that the whole world is our home […] Since the world is vast, we can only feel this by concentrating and centring […] Palestine is the world, the whole world is our home. This is humanity, this is imagination.”

The thought-provoking discussion invited interesting and probing questions from the 80-member audience, who brought up the significance of the academic boycott of Israel as an important and effective tool, the ways in which the Palestinian struggle has opened up a space for self-reflection for feminist scholars and scholarship and the need to celebrate Palestinian resilience without romanticising the suffering of Palestinians.

This webinar is the first in a series of workshops around what Palestine means for scholarship and knowledge. The second webinar will be held in October, to be followed by another two in November and December.

See the full conversation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyMJ1AkUBg0