Podcasts

In this important and timely episode of Let’s Talk – Black Knowing, Chelsea & David catch up with Palestinian-Egyptian writer, lawyer, academic researcher, mother of four, and current ARC Future Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at Macquarie University, Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah. They reflect on the 76th commemoration of the Palestinian Nakba, and the unthinkable violence of the Israeli occupation and the current genocide of Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza. They talk through the racist logics of zionism, and ways that Palestinians are silenced, repressed, policed, and targeted if they dare speak the truth about Israel’s violent colonial occupation. Randa shares some of her own experiences of zionist repression and violence, including attempts to have her fired from her job, removed from judging panels, and being targeted and smeared by shock jocks and mainstream media outlets.

From their shared experiences of the brutality of colonial institutions, Chelsea and Randa reflect on the ways that colonial media and universities both serve to reproduce the sustaining fictions and fantasies of settler colonialism: from myths of colonial benevolence and civilisation, to the hysterical fantasies of “imaginary spears” through which, as Dr. Amy McQuire explains, Indigenous people resisting colonisation are reframed as “terrorists”, “criminals” and deviants. And they reflect on the emergence of both social media and the university as a site of struggle in this moment: from the power and joy of the student encampments contesting the complicity of universities in genocide; to the courage and power of Palestinian journalists using whatever tools they have to directly challenge the shameful complicity and silence of mainstream media in the so-called west. 

All in all: it’s another huge conversation between three powerful and important community scholars who each commit themselves to asking the questions that matter most in this moment: putting their intellectual labour to work in helping build movements of care, joy and justice in the struggle to end to colonial occupation, from the river to the sea.