Dear New AERA Council Members and Colleagues,
I hope this email finds you well. I am writing to share the demands of the Petition for the Resolution for Justice in Palestine (attached), which has nearly 800 signatories. To give you some context, I reached out to all AERA council members in March. The following month, AERA President Janelle Scott provided the following response on behalf of the Council (screenshot attached).
As the Chair of the Decolonial, Postcolonial, and Anticolonial Studies SIG, I have organized collectively with outgoing SIG Officers (Ana Carolina Díaz Beltrán and Raquel Saenz), SIG Members, and EdScholars4Palestine to hold a People's Assembly in Denver during the conference. Hundreds of people showed up on a Friday night to see what we could collectively do to radically democratize AERA (if that's even possible) or if we should consider boycotting AERA to create an alternative organization, one that is not silent about and complicit in genocide. Many decided to work in between these spaces, since petition signatories believe we can still push AERA, even if that means pushing AERA to show minimum levels of solidarity by writing a statement against scholasticide and to meet the other demands of the Petition, many of which simply asked AERA to be consistent. Some signatories believe our presence in AERA is necessary despite its unwillingness to listen to our demands.
I am reaching out to you because I know that some of you have spoken out previously and stood in solidarity with students, faculty, and staff whose only crime is to be pro-Palestinian, as Dr. Cabrera1 posted a couple months ago and later called for faculty to be bold during these times, particularly as many have chosen to self-censor. Unfortunately, AERA Council members are not immune to self-censorship. I encourage new Council members to be bold and enact a radical form of democracy that certainly had little life, if at all, under Biden, but which has morphed into an explicitly authoritarian, fascist-adjacent regime.
What we're seeing today, in other words, cannot be separated from the repression we've seen on many campuses and the attacks on academic freedom before Trump began his second term. Similar to the reactionary "anti-CRT" and "anti-woke" education policies we saw passed after the massive protests that took place after George Floyd's murder, in the past two years we have seen how pro-Palestine and anti-genocide protests resulted in yet another reactionary wave. This time around, however, it is far more severe, since the attacks are more coordinated across party and ideological lines, resulting in arrests, suspensions, visa revocations, and deportations. There's also little doubt that academia's silence and moral apathy of the past two years (not to mention decades of complicity) has created the conditions for the continued assault on education today. Certainly, the silence of today will also have dire consequences in the near future.
It is with this urgency that I write to you today. I write as someone who was suspended last year by my university for my unequivocal pro-Palestine, anti-genocide, and decolonial/anticolonial political stance and public intellectual work. I write so that AERA can avoid reproducing what it claims to be against, particularly when this organization does not enact the democracy it apparently seeks to defend. Its actions do in fact speak louder than its words. I write on behalf of hundreds of signatories, hoping that AERA Council can finally take a stance against scholasticide and genocide, despite the potential consequences this may bring, which many of us know is a reality from personal experience. I write so that you can call for a meeting with the Council to discuss the demands of the Petition and to make this discussion public for AERA members to know where the AERA Council stands. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores
Also a new AERA Council member.