In a Time of Genocide: Academia’s Role and Responsibility
What is the responsibility of scholars, scholarship and academia in a time of genocide? Almost two years after Israel launched its military campaign in the Gaza Strip in the wake of the October 7th attacks, evidence of an unfolding genocide has become incontrovertible. The convergence between artificial intelligence, settler colonial dispossession and imperial orders of racial capitalism introduce new scales of industrial warfare that have been co-produced through epistemic and material investments within higher education in the UK and elsewhere. As the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s people becomes an expressed policy of the US and Israeli regimes, academia finds itself on the front lines of unavoidable moral, political, legal, and financial questions.
This moderated discussion brings into conversation two scholars who have publicly addressed such questions. Reflecting on lessons from Gaza and the wider struggle towards Palestinian sovereignty, they will discuss what is at stake in our habits of political and intellectual critique at this critical juncture.
Speakers:
Momodou Taal is a UK law graduate from the University of East Anglia. After obtaining his LLB, Momodou travelled to Cairo to study at Al-Azhar Mosque where he received an Islamic license in Islamic law and Arabic. Momodou is currently in the fourth year of his PhD at Cornell University in the Africana Department. His research focuses on conceptualisations of sovereignty, with a particular focus on West Africa. Momodou is the host of a popular podcast, The Malcolm Effect, dedicated to political education. Momodou is the author of The Malcolm Effect revisited and founder of Vox Ummah, an online platform that brings together Anti-Imperialist analyses from a Muslim perspective.
Toufic Haddad (PhD) is a Palestinian American academic and author and a fall 2025 IASH-SSPS Research Fellow (University of Edinburgh). He holds a PhD in Development Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and is the author of “Palestine Ltd: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory” (I.B. Tauris, 2016). Haddad has worked in various capacities across the Occupied Palestinian Territories as a journalist, researcher, consultant, editor, and publisher. He recently directed the Council for British Research in the Levant's Jerusalem Branch - the Kenyon Institute (2020-24).
Chaired by Dr Shaira Vadasaria, Senior Lecturer in Race and Decolonial Studies, Sociology
Co-sponsored by Alwaleed Centre, Social Anthropology, PIR-MERG and the BAME network.
