Academia

The Narcissism of Small Differences

15.09.2012

It’s been about seven months since Chris Hedges dropped his bombshell attack on Black Bloc tactics as the “cancer in Occupy” and his words still echo in activist circles across the country. Charging protestors who “dress in black” or “obscure their faces” with hypermasculine—even criminal—behavior, Hedges drove a wedge between radicals within Occupy apparently committed [...]

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Academic Freedom & Palestine: A Personal Account

29.11.2011

Good research is often controversial. In the social sciences, the exchange of new ideas, new interpretations of history, and the excavation of counter-hegemonic or what Michel Foucault would call “subjugated” knowledge unsettles and upsets received wisdom. For those of us fortunate enough to study a region as eternally fascinating and intellectually demanding as the Middle [...]

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Stephen Leberstein: Open Season on Academics

09.07.2011

The year began with threats of violence against Frances Fox Piven, distinguished professor of sociology and political science at the Graduate Center, following Glenn Beck’s repeated denunciations of Piven on his Fox network show and the posting of her home address on his blog. At the same time, Kristofer Petersen-Overton, a PhD student in political [...]

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Tony Kushner and the Corporatisation of CUNY

10.05.2011

The taboo surrounding critical discussion of Israel in the United States never ceases to amaze me. But when the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York (CUNY) recently decided not to grant an honorary degree to Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner because of his views on Israel, it felt personal. Three months [...]

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Letter to the CUNY Board of Trustees, Re: Tony Kushner

06.05.2011

Dear members of the board: I am writing to protest your vote to overturn John Jay College’s decision to grant an honorary degree to the award-winning playwright Tony Kushner. I’m sure you’ve been inundated with messages of support for Mr. Kushner, but I would like to add my drop to the flood and urge you [...]

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Beyond the Threshold of Atrocity: Nationalism, Biopower & Israel’s Occupation of Gaza

09.04.2011

I’ll be presenting my paper, “Beyond the Threshold of Atrocity: Nationalism, Biopower & Israel’s Occupation of Gaza” at the upcoming American Political Science Association annual meeting in Seattle this September. If you’d like to view a draft copy of my paper, you can get a copy here.

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Panel Discussion: Academic Freedom and the New McCarthyism

05.03.2011

March 14, 2011 @ 6.30 PM CUNY Graduate Center, rm 201 (basement level) 365 Fifth Avenue B/D/F/M/N/Q/R to 34th St-Herald Square Our university is once again under attack. Such vitriolic opponents of academic freedom as Fox News pundit Glenn Beck and NY Assemblyman Dov Hikind have recently targeted City University of New York faculty members [...]

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Academic Freedom Day at Hunter College

25.02.2011

March 2, 2011 @ 1.00 PM FDA Lounge 8th floor, West Building Hunter College New York, NY Come hear from Kristofer Petersen-Overton, Adjunct Lecturer of Political Science at Brooklyn College who was fired from his position as an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College one week before his course on Middle East politics was to begin. [...]

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New York College Racked Over ‘Pro-Palestinian’ Reading List

24.02.2011

NEW YORK // The Palestinian-Israeli conflict inspires political activism on college campuses across the United States, but rarely has the issue so regularly affected academic life as at Brooklyn College, which has large numbers of Orthodox Jews and Arabs in its student body. It has been less than a year since a book by a [...]

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The Autograph: Kristofer Petersen-Overton Comments on Middle East Politics

22.02.2011

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