« Kinship as an introduction to Ineigeneity? Rene M. Ramirez, Kinship: Settler Families and Indigenous Communities, PhD dissertation, Loyola University, 2026

Sociologists for Palestine: Gala Rexer, Kirsteen Paton, Karis Campion, ‘Sociology in the Times of Genocide’, The Sociological Review, 74, 5, 2026

18Sep26

Excerpt: The genocide in Gaza, in that sense, stands in for our global past and future. As Baconi (2024) writes, Gaza is ‘the abject of our time’, a place that signifies for Israel and the West the threat of terrorism, barbarism, backwardness and racialised overpopulation. Gaza offers a ‘blueprint’ for how settler colonies (and nation-states writ large) can become liberal democracies despite being founded upon the dispossession, disenfranchisement, occupation and extermination of others (Baconi, 2024). Given the long history of Israeli settler colonisation and violence (Khalidi, 2020), this transnational perspective on Palestine has existed long before the current genocide (see Frey and Rogaly in this collection). As Alex Lubin (2014) attests, the violence of the 20th century positioned Palestinians, Black Americans and Jews in the diaspora as the ultimate Other vis-a-vis modernity and its central institution, the nation-state. A shared understanding of imperialism, colonialism and white supremacy as global phenomena is key to these ‘geographies of liberation’, and continues to shape 21st-century shared struggle.

Sociologists for Palestine:

Universities in the U.S. have been tools of colonization, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism by participating directly and indirectly in land dispossession, weapons technologies, colonial governance, and racialized exploitation. Today, universities continue to participate in warmaking through investments in weapons technologies, internships and training programs, and research and design collaboration with state governments and corporations. This article lays a foundation for understanding the role of universities in the Israeli genocide in Gaza and provides sociologists with frameworks for action. We draw on our experiences as members of the organizing committee for Sociologists for Palestine (S4P) and from our expertise in racial capitalism, settler colonialism, militarism, and higher education. We use specific examples of ways that universities in the U.S. are implicated in the current genocide and structures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, and the tools that academics can use to resist these practices and reclaim our universities. Drawing on our experience organizing with S4P and on our campuses, we will discuss possibilities for building broad based movements to demand that academic institutions live up to the ethical principles that they claim to embrace. We focus on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) campaign as it relates to the American Sociological Association, but situate this work within a broader vision of transformation geared toward the decommodification, decolonization, and indigenization of higher education.


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