Palestine and the Western Academe: Fighting the Exception, Defending Epistemic Justice

Walaa Alqaisiya is a Scholar of Middle East Studies based at Northwest University in the People's Republic of China. She received her PhD in Human Geography from Durham University (UK), and taught at the Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE, UK). Her research spans Indigenous ecologies, gender and sexuality studies, and decolonial theories. Her book Decolonial Queering in Palestine (Routledge 2022) examines how Palestinian queer politics challenge Zionist settler-colonialism while imagining a free Palestine beyond the Oslo impasse. Alqaisiya's work appears in prestigious journals including Social and Cultural Geography, Political Geography, Radical Philosophy, and Palestine Studies. Building on research from her Global Marie Curie Fellowship across Ca' Foscari University (Italy), Columbia University (USA), and LSE, she currently studies colonial ecocidal violence and Indigenous women's ecologies from Palestine to Turtle Island. She serves on the editorial boards of Middle East Critique and Gender Place and Culture.

Nicola Perugini teaches International Politics at the University of Edinburgh (UK), focusing on international law, human rights, and violence. He co-authored The Human Right to Dominate (2015), Morbid Symptoms (2017), and Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (2020). His research spans war ethics, human rights politics, humanitarianism, refugee studies, and settler-colonialism. His current project, "Decolonising the Civilian," examines decolonization, international law, and civilian status in armed conflicts. Perugini has held prestigious positions at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, Brown University (Mellon Fellow), and as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie and Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow. He previously taught at the American University of Rome, Al Quds Bard College (where he directed the Human Rights Program), and University of Bologna. He has served as a consultant for UNESCO and UN Women. His opinion pieces have appeared in several publications including Al Jazeera, London Review of Books, Jewish Currents, and The Nation.