Description
What, as academics, do we see, and what do we choose to 'unsee'? Who can choose to 'unsee' a genocide unfolding, and who cannot? How does unseeing, and its companion, silence, implicate us in war-crimes and atrocities that are happening far away? Does choosing to see and 'speak up' about genocide blur the supposed boundaries of an intellectual life and 'activism'? Are there exceptional times when that supposed boundary must be crossed, out of moral and indeed academic responsibility? Or is the boundary a false one anyway? The disparity in academic responses to catastrophic world events that shake the edifice of International Relations exposes a) the divergence in motives that drive people to enter academia in the first place; b) the divergence in political strategies; and c) the unevenness in career implications. But, as this roundtable considers in light of events in Gaza, such disparity is not without consequence - silences, pretences of innocence, contrived aloofness, juxtaposed with speaking up, affects academia, affects discourse, and affects politics.
