Description
The growing centrality of Palestine in global discourse signifies a paradigm shift wherein the Palestinian struggle is becoming recognized as emblematic of broader global forces of injustice, oppression, and exploitation that affect various marginalized and oppressed communities globally. Informed by the theories of decoloniality, anti-colonial education, and the pedagogy of solidarity, this paper examines the pedagogical efforts to design an IR module, "Global Palestine and the Politics of Solidarity," that situates Palestine as a site of a global struggle for justice and a focal point for international solidarity activism. Co-written with a third-year student, the paper explores a plethora of decolonizing modes, processes, and strategies to create a classroom that serves as a site of decolonial and anti-colonial learning, action-oriented engagement, and solidarity. These efforts include undoing colonial discursive spaces and the relevant conceptual and theoretical paradigms in the study of Palestine-Israel by foregrounding the marginalized voices and epistemologies of indigenous anti-colonial sources of knowledge, challenging traditional classroom structures and teaching oligarchies, undoing the coloniality of power through critical processes of self-reflexivity, and reimagining alternative political futures without global colonial, imperial, and racist structures.
