By Dr Sheree Trotter on the Times of Israel…
Recently, the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies imposed a policy mandating territorial land acknowledgements for academics wishing to submit articles to their journal, or participate in the annual conference, or who work or study at an institution located on “land appropriated from Indigenous peoples by settler colonial regimes.”
This is but one example of the problematic nature of academia’s embrace of decolonization, in which performativity appears to take priority over intellectual debate and rigour. Building on the claim of historian Patrick Wolfe, that Settler Colonialism is a persistent structure, not simply a historical event, academic institutions have adopted symbolic acts, which do little for the Indigenous peoples themselves, but are seen as “critical ethical and political gestures” to address a perceived problem of “power dynamics in knowledge production.”
As I have argued elsewhere, Settler Colonialism, as an interpretive model, in both its methodological form and its contemporary political deployment, is deeply flawed. Its presentist orientation, its selective use of historical material, and its rigid interpretive categories produce not clarity, but distortion.
Read the article in full on the Times of Israel HERE.
