In January, the University of Michigan Faculty Senate passed a resolution calling for “the University’s leadership, including the Board of Regents, to divest from its financial holdings in companies that invest in Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza.” The statement highlighted the unprecedented rate of civilian deaths in Gaza, and that American financial sources are central to Israel’s ongoing genocide. Working with Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), the TAHRIR Coalition, and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, and others, the resolution drew on the tradition of activism against South Africa’s apartheid regime, and ongoing anti-racist work.
Today we speak with members of the UM faculty, who tell us about the background of the resolution, the work they did to pass it, and the campaigns on campus that are building off its success. Our conversation offers a range of insights that will be useful to campus activists elsewhere.
Charlotte Karem Albrecht is an Associate Professor of American Culture and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, where she is also core faculty in the Arab and Muslim American Studies program and affiliated faculty for the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies and the Race, Law, and History Program. Her research interests include Arab American history, histories of gender and sexuality, women of color feminist theory, queer of color critique, and interdisciplinary historicist methods. Her first book, Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling, was published open access with University of California Press. Karem Albrecht holds a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota. Her work has also been published in Arab Studies Quarterly, Gender & History, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and multiple edited collections.
Leila Kawar is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where she holds appointments in the Department of American Culture and in the Social Theory and Practice Program. Kawar’s research examines the cultural dimensions of legal practice, focusing on how legal advocacy intersects with the politics of migration, citizenship, and labor. Her first book, Contesting Immigration Policy in Court: Legal Activism and Its Radiating Effects in the United States and France (Cambridge University Press 2015) asks what difference law has made in immigration policymaking in the U.S. and France since the 1970s. Challenging the conventional wisdom that “cause litigation” has little long-term impact unless it produces broad rights-protective principles, the book shows that legal contestation can have important radiating effects by reshaping how political actors approach immigration issues. Her current book project, Conditioning Human Mobility: Rights, Regulation, and the Transnational Construction of the Migrant Worker, is an empirically-grounded study that critically examines international law’s historical and contemporary entanglements with migrant labor recruitment. Kawar is a regular contributor to the Detroit-based socialist journal Against the Current.
Derek R. Peterson is Ali Mazrui Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Michigan, and an elected member of the Faculty Senate Assembly.