Palestine Research Cluster

Below is the list of Research Projects in the Palestine Research Cluster at York University:

Criminalization and Policing of Pro-Palestinian Activism on University Campuses in North America

Jannat Yaqobi, Graduate Student, Sociology

Project: Criminalization and Policing of Pro-Palestinian Activism on University Campuses in North America

Jannat Yaqobi’s research examines how pro-Palestinian activism is criminalized and policed across university campuses in Canada and the United States. Her work investigates how institutional governance, campus security, and administrative mechanisms operate to restrict student organizing, raising urgent questions about academic freedom, student rights, and the governance of dissent in higher education. Supervised by Dr. Lesley J. Wood, her research contributes to broader debates on policing, institutional power, and the suppression of political expression in the context of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

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From Resistance to Realignment: India, Third World Internationalism, and the Shifting Politics of Palestinian Solidarity

Jay Ramasubramanyam, Faculty Member, Dept. of Social Science

Project: From Resistance to Realignment: India, Third World Internationalism, and the Shifting Politics of Palestinian Solidarity

Professor Ramasubramanyam’s research traces the historical shift in India’s relationship to Palestine, from early commitments to anti-colonial solidarity and Third World internationalism to contemporary forms of geopolitical realignment. The project examines how moral commitments to anti-settler colonialism have been reshaped by strategic pragmatism within an increasingly multipolar global order, situating Palestine within broader transformations in foreign policy and postcolonial political imaginaries.

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Rahmi — Testimony, Animation, and Children’s Experiences of Genocide

Sheetal Magan, Student, Cinema and Media Studies

Project: Rahmi — Testimony, Animation, and Children’s Experiences of Genocide

Sheetal Magan’s project uses animation and testimony to document and work with the experiences of children who have lived through the genocide in Gaza. The project responds to the intensified targeting of children and explores how creative media practices can bear witness to violence while preserving memory. Working with collaborators in Cinema and Media Studies, including Professor John Greyson, this project investigates animation as a medium for testimony, memory, and visual documentation.

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Punishing Pro-Palestinian Activism: The Case of York University as an Expansion of Policing

Nat Perez de la Cruz, MA Student, Socio-Legal Studies

Project: Punishing Pro-Palestinian Activism: The Case of York University as an Expansion of Policing

Nat Perez de la Cruz’s Major Resarch Paper examines the response of York University to student unions that publicly supported Palestinian resistance and condemned the genocide in Gaza. The project argues for an expanded understanding of policing that includes non-police institutional actors, demonstrating how administrative, legal, and governance mechanisms function to discipline political expression. This research contributes to socio-legal debates on policing, institutional power, and the regulation of dissent within universities.

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From War on Terror to War on Palestine: Torture, Political Imagination, and the Animality of War

Salman Hussain, Connected Minds Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Kinesiology and Health Science & Centre for Feminist Research

Project: From War on Terror to War on Palestine: Torture, Political Imagination, and the Animality of War

Salman Hussain’s research traces the conceptual and political continuities between the War on Terror and contemporary representations of Palestine. His work examines how torture, dehumanization, and racialized imaginaries shape the political imagination through which violence against Palestinians is rendered intelligible and permissible. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches, his research situates Palestine within broader genealogies of racialized state violence and imperial governance

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Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine (eds. Jeremy Wildeman & M. Muhannad Ayyash)

Peige Desjarlais, PhD Candidate, Social Anthropology

Project: Canada as a Settler Colony on the Question of Palestine (eds. Jeremy Wildeman & M. Muhannad Ayyash)

Peige Desjarlais is co-author (with Dr. Randa Farah) of the chapter “Canada and the Palestinian Refugees: Humanitarian License to Dispossess?” in this edited volume. Her chapter examines how humanitarianism, refugee policy, and settler colonial logics intersect in Canada’s relationship to Palestinian displacement.

The book as a whole situates Canada and Palestine within shared and entangled settler colonial histories, arguing that understanding Canada’s political, legal, and humanitarian relationship to Palestine requires recognizing these parallel colonial formations. Through contributions that connect policy, history, and political analysis, the volume offers one of the first sustained treatments in a Canadian context of how settler colonialism on Turtle Island shapes Canada’s stance on the question of Palestine.

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High Roads (Documentary Film, West Bank, 2022)

Giuliana Racco, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change

Project: High Roads (Documentary Film, West Bank, 2022)

Giuliana Racco is the filmmaker of High Roads, a short documentary filmed in the West Bank that follows everyday movement, landscape, and lived experience under conditions of occupation. The film foregrounds the voices and presence of Palestinians navigating constrained geographies, including Dr. Wafaa Khater, a particle physicist and professor at Birzeit University.

Blending ecological attention, visual storytelling, and political witnessing, High Roads documents how land, mobility, and daily life are shaped by settler colonial infrastructures. The film will be screened at EcoArts in March.

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Sport Scholars for Justice in Palestine (Research / Collective)

Jess Nachman

PhD Candidate, School of Kinesiology & Health Science

Research / Collective: Sport Scholars for Justice in Palestine

Jess Nachman is part of Sport Scholars for Justice in Palestine, a collective of researchers engaged in scholarship, advocacy, and public education on sport, anti-imperialism, and Palestine. The collective curates a public reading list (https://sportscholarsforjusticeinpalestine.org/) and multimedia resources, including podcasts and printable materials, and maintains an active social media presence to mobilize sport as a site of political education and solidarity (https://www.instagram.com/ss4j.pal/)

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Anti-Palestinian Racism and the Intersections of Islamophobia and Arabophobia

Lauren Moore. PhD Student, Socio-Legal Studies

Project: Anti-Palestinian Racism and the Intersections of Islamophobia and Arabophobia

Lauren Moore’s research examines how anti-Palestinian racism operates through intersecting forms of Islamophobia and Arabophobia across legal, political, and social contexts.

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Project Title: From Donor to Delivery: Navigating Aid Channels from Canada to Gaza

In the wake of the escalating humanitarian crisis in Gaza, individual citizens across the world have responded with private donations via nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) for the provision of medical aid, shelter, food supplies, psychological support, educational materials and essential goods. This study will examine how donations received by Canadian NGOs are transferred and implemented in Gaza, shedding light on how humanitarian networks have been operating, adapting, and fracturing in the context of mass violence and political complexity and complicity.

Research Team:
Dr. Khalidah Ali, Postdoctoral Researcher, Islamophobia Research Hub, York University
Dr. Aaida A. Mamuji, Associate Professor, Disaster & Emergency Management, York University
Dr. Nadia Hassan, Assistant Professor, School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, York University
Dr. Sanober Omar, Associate Professor, Department of Politics, York University

Funded by: Islamophobia Hub; York Research Support Grant

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Project Title: Documenting the “Palestine Exception": An Overview of Trends in Islamophobia, Anti-Palestinian and Anti-Arab Racism in Canada in the aftermath of October 7, 2023

In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, Canada saw a rise in anti-Palestinian racism (APR), Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism (AAR) and antisemitism that affects many areas of life and work for Canadians. This report contributes to broadening our understanding of this troubling trend by documenting incidents of Islamophobia, APR and AAR in Canada, making visible the diversity of communities and people affected as well as the range of types of incidents.

Research Team:
Islamophobia Research Hub, York University

Funded by:
The Honourable Mohammad Al Zaibak and Family (Bay Tree Foundation) and anonymous donors.

Project Website:
https://www.yorku.ca/laps/research/islamophobia/documenting-the-palestine-exception-082025/

Project Report:
Documenting the Palestinian Exception
Link: https://www.yorku.ca/laps/research/islamophobia/documenting-the-palestine-exception-082025/

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Project Title: Unauthorized Amplification Devices: Queer Cinema, Queer Bodies and the Cultural Boycott of Israel

This research-creation dissertation project focuses on Queer BDS Cinema, performing a case study on 38 queer BDS films.

Research Team:
Dr. John Greyson, Associate Professor, School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design

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Project Title: Genocidal Surveillant Assemblage in Palestine: A Socio-Legal Analysis

This forthcoming article in the Journal of Genocide Research advances the concept of Genocidal Surveillant Assemblage (GSA). Since October 2023, Israel has been deploying integrated surveillance systems in its genocide campaign to enable the automated destruction of Palestinians as a group and the infrastructure necessary for their survival. The GSA is both shaped by Israel’s settler-colonial project in Palestine and furthers it. As an amalgamated-transcending surveillance infrastructure, the GSA affects or delimits genocidal action and the parameters of mass destruction, thus presenting a dangerous precedent for twenty-first-century genocide contexts.

Research Team:
Dr. Mais Qandeel, Associate Professor, Örebro University
Dr. Ozgun Topak, Associate Professor, Department of Social Science, York University

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Project Title: Racial Necrogeographies: Park 51, Palestine, and the Limits of Memorialization

This project brings together three interrelated geographic and analytical sites:

1. pro-Palestine demonstrations by NYU University students in New York City and their criminalization and policing;
2. the politically fraught construction of the so-called “9/11 mosque” near the site of the former World Trade Centres; and
3. the historically unmarked, unclaimed, and unrecognized burial grounds of Black and Indigenous dead that populate the spaces between and underneath these sites.

Using the concept of necrogeographies, or the ways in which whiteness structures spaces of belonging for both the living and the dead, the project explores the mapping and structuring of racialized space, the boundaries of complicity, mourning, and memorialization, alongside the futurities of Muslim, Black, and Indigenous communities.

Research Team:
Dr. Safiyah Rochelle, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Science, York University

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Project Title: Palestinian Women’s Resistance, Agroecology and Feminist Political Ecology Through Genocide

This project draws from Dr. Ahmed Abu Shaban’s research with women farmers in Gaza to examine how Palestinian women’s agroecological labour resists colonial, patriarchal, and military violence while sustaining life under genocide. Grounded in a feminist political ecology framework, it will analyze existing qualitative fieldwork—specifically interviews with women farmers, seed-saving networks, and women’s cooperatives—and new focus group data with Palestinian women farmers. The project will contribute to debates on agroecology under siege and settler-colonial ecocide, and advance interdisciplinary work on settler-colonialism, anti-colonial food systems, feminist political ecology, and Palestinian resistance.

Research Team:
Dr. Ahmed Abu Shaban, Associate Professor & Dean, Faculty of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine, Al Azhar University Gaza; Visiting Professor, Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change, York University
Dr. Sarah Rotz, Associate Professor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University

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Project Title: The Everyday in Gaza in Genocide Times and their Aftermath

This project relates the everyday to the political. Using fieldwork methodology and archival research of documents, visual materials, podcasts, and film, it considers how small acts constitute ways of constructing sociability and community. It relates the work of survivance as a form of life that leads to re-imagining the future, and the work of care as an expression of relationality and politicity.

Research Team:
Dr. Ratiba Hadj-Moussa and colleagues from Gaza universities.

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