Book Launch with Maya Wind: 

Towers of Ivory and Steel

April 3, 6:30 - 8:30 PM

Morris J Wosk Centre for Dialogue | WCC 320

Israeli universities are often celebrated as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Maya Wind will be joined by Brenna Bhandar (UBC) and Adel Iskander (SFU) to discuss her new book, which examines how Israeli universities are in fact directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights. Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all service Israeli occupation and apartheid, while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education, stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This unprecedented ethnographic study introduces a unique photography-based storytelling method that brings together everyday Palestinians and Israelis to begin connecting rather than comparing their distinct yet organically connected histories of suffering and exile resulting from the Holocaust and the Nakba. Working with Palestinians and Israelis living in their respective Canadian diasporas who are of the Holocaust and Nakba postmemory generations-those who did not experience these traumas but are nonetheless haunted by them-this study demonstrates that storytelling and photography enable the occasions and conditions of possibility necessary for willing the impossible. That is, by narrating and then exchanging their (post)memories of the Holocaust and/or the Nakba through associated vernacular photographs, project participants were able to connect rather than compare their histories of suffering and exile; take moral, ethical, and political responsibility for one another; and imagine new forms of cohabitation grounded in justice and equitable rights for all.

FEATURING

Maya Wind is a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her research on the reproduction and international export of Israeli security expertise has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Killam Laureates Trust. Her first book, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (Verso 2024), investigates the complicity of Israeli universities in the violation of Palestinian rights and the occupation of Palestine.

IN CONVERSATION WITH

Brenna Bhandar is Associate Professor at Allard Law Faculty, UBC and the author of The Colonial Lives of Property.

Adel Iskandar is Associate Professor of Global Communication at Simon Fraser University where he is Director of the Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies and the Graduate Chair in the School of Communications.

Co-Sponsors: CCMS, SFU School of Communication, SFU School for International Studies, SFU Labour Studie Program, SFU Institute for the Humanities