EASA’s Decolonial Anthropology Network (DAN) hosted the first online session, entitled Palestinian Epistemicide and Academic Silence on 1 December at 4pm. Please, see the report below
REPORT from the EASA DAN’s roundtable on Palestinian Epistemicide and Academic Silence
The inaugural roundtable of the Decolonial Anthropology Network felt less like an academic event and more like a rupture—an opening carved by those who refuse to bow to the machinery of erasure.
We gathered to confront what many try to name as tragedy but is, in truth, an epistemicide: the systematic destruction of Palestinian knowledge, memory, and intellectual life—and the deafening silence that Western academia keeps polishing as neutrality.
With us were friends who have never chosen the easy path:
Ana Ivasiuc, now Vice-President of EASA, whose work cuts through the architectures of security and policing to reveal the fragile, beating heart of resistance.
Anna-Esther Younes, always speaking from the margins, because the center never deserved her voice. Her work braids Indigenous struggles, Black radical thought, and the realities of settler colonialism. She joins us freshly honored with the Emma Goldman award—though her insight has never needed a medal.
Mary Rambaran-Olm, who refuses to let the medieval past be a fortress for white supremacy, practicing scholarship as a frontline rather than a refuge.
Leonardo Schiocchet, for whom borders—geographic, disciplinary, ideological—are just the illusions power wants us to believe in.
And Claudio, who arrived carrying far more knowledge than he ever claimed aloud, but who still stepped back so that others’ voices could rise. His humility was not absence but anchor.
Across the conversation, certain truths returned like echoes—urgent, heavy, undeniable:
Silence is complicity.
Silence is not neutral; it is a service rendered to power. When institutions and individuals choose muteness they become the invisible engineers of erasure — furnishing the oppressor with the quiet space needed to finish what violence begins. To be silent before an epistemicide is to consent, by omission, to the removal of entire languages of thought.
The destruction of education isn’t collateral; it is the primary target.
Strike the schools and you don’t merely break buildings — you sever futures. Education is the scaffolding of collective memory and imagination; destroying it is a tactic to amputate a people’s capacity to narrate, to plan, to resist. This is strategic unmaking: remove the teachers, hollow the archives, and you make tomorrow uninhabitable.
How do you research when you’re hungry? When you’re cold?
Research under siege is not a laboratory experiment; it is radical persistence. Hunger and cold distort methods and timelines, but they also sharpen questions — urgency forces scholarship to reckon with survival as methodology. The act of inquiry then becomes a moral technology: to know, archive, and testify is itself a refusal to be rendered invisible.
They are not “survivors.” They are researchers.
Calling people “survivors” honors endurance but risks flattening a political life into trauma alone. These are makers of knowledge — archivists, theorists, chroniclers — whose labor produces categories, concepts, and counternarratives. Naming them only as survivors erases the intellectual agency that contests erasure.
The destruction of research is the destruction of a people’s tomorrow.
To destroy a community’s projects of knowing is to demolish its horizon. Research creates possible futures; when you bomb labs and libraries you do more than erase facts — you remove the very blueprints by which a society might rebuild, learn, or imagine justice. Violence against inquiry is violence against possibility.
To be in the Academy but not of it.
There is a stance that inhabits the institution while refusing its loyalties: a Janus face that learns its grammar to repurpose it for emancipation. This tension—working from within while accountable to movements outside—turns academic presence into a site of sabotage and care. It is the art of refusing assimilation without abandoning the tools that might be wielded against domination.
Sharing knowledge is the oldest form of resistance.
Circulation undoes colonial monopolies of truth. Every lecture, copy, translation, and whispered lesson past checkpoints is an act of redistribution: knowledge that travels fractures the scarcity power depends on. When we share, we transform solitary facts into communal weapons of survival and solidarity.
Thinking from destruction, from death—from the day after.
To imagine the day after while rubble still smolders is to practice refusal as imagination. It is to assemble blueprints in the midst of ruin: legal claims, curricula, gardens, memory projects. This temporal inversion — planning the future from the epicenter of loss — is a radical epistemic tactic: it insists that ruin is not the final grammar of a people’s story.
As we closed, one truth ran beneath every voice, like a river carving stone:
Genocides do not emerge in isolation. They are woven through the same structures—racial capitalism, militarization, settler colonialism, and the calculated devaluation of certain lives and knowledges. What unfolds in Palestine reverberates across other histories, other wounds, other uprisings.
But if the violence is structural, then so is the resistance.
And today, in this space, resistance felt not like a metaphor but a method.
Every insight shared, every refusal to be silent, every gesture of solidarity opened small but real cracks in the architecture of domination.
I leave this gathering believing that other paths are not only imaginable—they are already forming under our feet. Because you are building them. Because you insist on dignity not as theory but as practice. Because you show, daily, that another way of knowing, teaching, and living together is possible, even in the shadow of immense violence.
Our struggles are entwined.
Our futures are intertwined.
And the worlds we need will not arrive on their own.
We build them together.
