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Canadian Political Science Association2025 Annual Conference Programme
The Politics of Belonging: Conflict,
Community, Curriculum
Hosted at George Brown College, Toronto, CANADA
June 3 to June 5, 20252025 Annual Conference Programme
The Politics of Belonging: Conflict,
Community, Curriculum
Hosted at George Brown College
June 3 to June 5, 2025
Workshop 6 - Anti-oppressive strategies and solidarity in and out the classroom (Presented by the Race, Ethnicity, Indigenous Peoples And Politics Section)
W618(a) - Workshop 6 - Roundtable: Teaching in Unconscionable Times: Pedagogies of Resistance and the Mandate to Speak
Date: Jun 5 | Time: 12:00pm to 01:30pm | Location:
Chair/Président/Présidente : Nisha Nath (Athabasca University)
Mariam Georgis (Simon Fraser)Yasmeen Abu-Laban (University of Alberta)
Abigail Bakan (University of Toronto)
Jasmin Habib (University of Waterloo)
Davina Bhandar (University of Victoria)
Eleyan Sawafta (University of Alberta)
Ethel Tungohan (York University)
Nisha Nath (Athabasca University)
Christine Sy (Univeristy of Victoria)
Abstract: Teaching in Unconscionable Times: Pedagogies of Resistance and the Mandate to Speak Roundtable Organizers: Mariam Georgis (SFU) and Nisha Nath (Athabasca) In this roundtable, we reflect on what it means to teach in unconscionable times, but also on why we must teach. At the time of writing of this proposal, for over one year, we are have been witnessing a genocide of the Palestinian people in real time. This witnessing is not passive—Palestinians and their allies are marching in the streets in unprecedented numbers, Jewish protesters insist “not in my name”, even elected officials and bureaucrats are resigning to contest state violence, all the while Canada, the US, other Western powers, the corporate media, and academic institutions maintain active and intentional complicity to uphold the Israeli state’s regime of settler colonial oppression. In an open letter to international academic institutions, Birzeit University in Palestine called upon “the international academic community, unions, and students to fulfill their intellectual and academic duty of seeking truth, maintaining a critical distance from state-sponsored propaganda, and to hold the perpetrators of genocide and those complicit with them accountable.” Coming together in conversation and strategy, panelists in this roundtable explore how we have and continue to grapple with responding to the calls of Palestinians in our teaching, how we draw connections to broader struggles against colonial and imperial violence, how we navigate the surveillance and contexts of hostility in Western settler colonial academic institutions, and how we can support each other and Palestinians in this work. As political scientists, the question becomes, how must we teach in these unconscionable times?