“Solidarity means changing the way the world works with those in crisis.”
– Dr Ahmed Kamal Junina, The Guardian, 19 August 2025.
Despite the deliberate devastation of educational and healthcare infrastructure, the purposeful denial of vital resources, and indiscriminate bombardment, scholars in Gaza continue to learn and to create knowledge.
In this session, we will be joined by Dr Ahmed Kamal Junina, Head of the English department and Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at Al-Aqsa University, alongside student representatives of his international education initiative, RECONNECT, to discuss the meaning of solidarity in the face of siege and occupation.
This session creates space to learn of the scholarship and art being produced in Gaza, including a special issue of the CHASE-funded journal Brief Encounters (forthcoming), and to think collectively about how to defend Palestinian culture and protect access to education as an inalienable right.
Attendees are asked to consider making a donation to Taawon’s ISNAD programme, which aims to enable 15,000 students to resume their studies remotely by providing funded scholarships and covering the cost of tuition fees.
To sponsor one student for one semester costs $535, which is roughly £395. To sponsor one student for an entire academic year (two semesters) costs US$1,070, or about £790. You can listen to graduate student Hadeel describe how the ISNAD programme has supported her academic journey.
To make a donation, please visit the following link: https://www.every.org/taawon/f/support-university-students.
Taawon is a Palestinian-led non-profit civic organisation which has supported the lives of Palestinians by preserving their heritage and identity, sustaining their living culture and building civil society since 1983. The lives of more than one million Palestinians are positively impacted by their work every year.
