Continuing academic work during the genocide in Palestine
Maria Grazia Imperiale and Giovanna Fassetta
A year after the launch of the LINES4Palestine report, we would like to provide an update on the activities that we developed.
The LINES4Palestine (L4P) project, funded by the British Council within the Language for Resilience programme (see all funded projects between 2024-2025), started in January 2024 as a way to provide academic support to students and colleagues in Gaza, through one-to-one mentoring and a series of workshops. It involved over 40 colleagues from the University of Glasgow, mostly from the School of Education, who volunteered our time, offering teaching and mentoring during the first months of genocide. The L4P project builds on collaborations between Glasgow and institutions in Gaza that started back in 2011, thanks to the pioneering work of Dr Keith Hammond. Over the last 15 years, ways of working, trust, and, importantly, friendships have developed. When the genocide began, our relationships and work did not stop; after the first two months of paralysis, the work re-started, accelerated and intensified, often in improvised and fragmented ways, born primarily from the need to feel that we were doing ‘something’ to support the students, colleagues and friends we had been collaborating with for so long.
Writing about this work as “impact”, or as a “success story”, sits a bit uncomfortably under the circumstances. The language of impact entails making a difference through our research “beyond any academic borders, out in society and in the world we all inhabit” (see: https://www.gla.ac.uk/research/impact/). The scale of the challenges our colleagues were facing feels too huge for any such claim to seem appropriate. We were not able to make a difference to the conditions in which our colleagues and students were living; we did not make them safer, nor reduce the unimaginable horrors they were going through. Our starting point was: what are our skills, and how can we support our longstanding partners as they try to survive and to carry on? It was – it is – about our responsibility and ethical commitment to our colleagues, grounded in our values and in a non-utopian belief in social and educational justice, and about our insistence on academic solidarity and in supporting, where possible, the continuation of academic life.
After our LINES4Palestine project, the work developed in several directions in both Research and Teaching, thanks to the support of the School of Education (with the LINES4Palestine 2 project), another small grant from the British Council (the LINES to the Future project) and the Scottish Council Funding (the Education in Conflict project). Across these projects, we developed activities together with colleagues based at 12 different institutions, worldwide. The work reached over 500 students in Gaza. We delivered:
- Lecture series and short courses on research methods, language testing, adult education, and critical pedagogy, recognised by the Islamic University of Gaza and shaped through ongoing dialogue with colleagues there. In total, around 500 undergraduate and postgraduate students took part, and about 65 online synchronous sessions were held. Contributions came from colleagues at the University of Glasgow (College of Social Sciences and School of Education), as well as from the University of Malta, University of Tampere, University of Otago, Trinity College Dublin, and from Manchester Metropolitan University, Durham University, and Northumbria University in the UK.
- In coordination with the University of Sanctuary team, 23 students completed an English language test, required for graduation at the Islamic University of Gaza and to apply for PGT study abroad. A group of colleagues at Trinity College Dublin helped the students prepare for the language test through small groups mentoring.
- Co-supervision arrangements were set up between the School of Education at Glasgow and the Islamic University of Gaza for 8 Master’s students who were about to start working on their dissertation when the war started and were forced to interrupt their studies. To date, five students have successfully passed their vivas.
- Access to the University of Glasgow library was provided to a small number of students involved in our research projects and to those supervised by our staff.
- Individual mentoring (initiated during the first L4P project for 17 students) supported students particularly with scholarship applications. We are aware of at least 12 students who last year secured scholarships and were able to evacuate and continue their studies abroad. A much higher number of students secured unconditional offers, and this is continuing this year. (Evacuation were coordinated via the Gaza Scholarships Initiative, led by Dr Nora Parr at the University of Birmingham, to which our colleague Prof. Alison Phipps contributed to; we were not directly involved in this).
- A telecollaboration (COIL) project, LINEs to the Future, led by Damian Ross (University of Porto) and funded by the British Council through the SARD programme, brought together students in Gaza and Porto to work on creative film-making, producing short science-fiction films. The films will be screened in Glasgow during the BAICE conference: everybody is welcome! (and thank you to BAICE for hosting this)
- We developed Voices from Gaza, coordinated by Michael Quinn, a blog collecting poems and short texts written by students in Gaza, which was picked up by the media.
- In research, through the Education in Conflict project, we delivered qualitative methods training to Master’s and PhD students from different Gazan institutions. Some of these students then worked as peer-researchers, collecting data collection with Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) students on institutional responses to the genocide, to integrate the work of senior IUG colleagues who collected data from senior management and staff. All our collaborators were paid (while it is not an easy process, it is possible to transfer money to Gaza).
What, then, has been the impact? Students and colleagues in Gaza have described the value of these activities as moments of connection, of intellectual engagement, of something resembling normality, even though briefly; as evidence that they had not been entirely abandoned. These are small things, and probably do not accumulate into the kinds of outcomes usually associated with “impact” (beyond academia?). But they did matter, and we believe that the relationships established, friendships sometimes, go well beyond academia. Can we measure these? Maybe not. Were these important? They definitely were.
At the same time, the work did not remain confined to these immediate interactions, but it also created openings. Other colleagues and institutions which had never worked with Palestine before, initiated or extended their own forms of engagement and commitment, drawing on the relationships, practices, and forms of mediation developed through L4P and Lines4Palestine 2. In this sense, the impact has been diffuse, potentially at global level, and – most of all - relational: in making connections possible, in building trust, and possibly, as colleagues have told us, in showing, in concrete ways, how academic collaboration might continue during genocide.
None of this has been straightforward to sustain. The work has been - and still is - emotionally difficult and, at times, overwhelming. But there is a collective movement, an expression of solidarity behind it that has nourished it, sustained it and, importantly, allowed all of us involved in this to ‘take turns’: when someone needed a break, someone else would step in. This, too, is part of the reality of (collegial) work, not something external to it.
These projects did not “transform lives” nor change material conditions, but they helped to sustain relationships and forms of academic practice at a time when both were – still are - under severe strain and continuous attempts at erasure. Perhaps also these activities have shown to others, beyond Gaza, that it is possible to act, collectively, imperfectly, and without guarantees, by opening doors, maintaining personal and professional connections, and holding on to ways of working grounded in trust, solidarity and in the collective.
