Comparative Scholasticide in Historical Perspective, 1915 to Today

AHA Session 205
Saturday, January 10, 2026: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Continental A (Hilton Chicago, Lobby Level)
Chair:
Priya Lal, Boston College

Session Abstract

This panel explores scholasticide as a category of historical analysis. The term was first coined by international relations theorist Karma Nabulsi in 2009 to describe the systematic destruction of educational infrastructures and the arrest, detention, or murder of teachers and students in Palestine. Since then, its extension across periodizations and geographies has proven its analytical purchase. This panel will establish the ways that scholasticide offers a necessary conceptual tool across multiple historiographies, by showing how it is a concept that is at once specific enough to deal with the uniqueness of pedagogical infrastructures, while capacious enough to address them in all their manifestations, from archives to heritage sites. Drawing upon experiences of scholasticide in Asia Minor, Sudan, Zambia, Tanzania, the United States, and the Caribbean, from the twentieth century into the twenty-first, the scholars assembled here expand our understanding of what constitutes this form of violence, while excavating genealogies of resistance to it.

Beginning with the Armenian genocide of 1915, Ayse Polat offers a long durée understanding of scholasticide not as an episodic event, but a durational experience of epistemic erasure. Pairing scholasticide with histories of the Nakba as structure, Polat offers ways to consider how the Turkish Republic aspired to silence Armenian, Circassian, and Kurdish intellectuals and liquidate their languages, institutions, and educational infrastructures. Moving to Tanzania and Zambia, Priya Lal offers an alternative means of understanding scholasticide as a durational process. In tracing the evolution of postcolonial national development programs that heavily invested in higher education to their hollowing out in the aftermath of structural adjustment, Lal considers scholasticide as a ‘slow’, rather than spectacular, form of violence. Minkah Makalani also begins his paper in the decolonizing moment of the 1960s, here to recover genealogies of epistemic resistance to scholasticide. Reconstructing the work of the New World Group of educators and intellectuals in the Caribbean and their counterparts in Black Power groups in the US, Makalani asks us to consider how their demands worked not to assimilate Black knowledge into existing structures, but to overturn scholasticidal regimes of intellectual authority. In extending his periodization to present-day attacks on critical race theory and diversity measures, Makalani brings us into twenty-first century scholasticidal projects. Contemporary Sudan, where our panel concludes, is among the most horrific cases of twenty-first century scholasticide as spectacular violence. Yet, as our panelists Rebecca Glade and Muna Elgadal demonstrate in a co-authored paper, it is also home to extraordinary examples of resistance. Against the longer history of the state’s attempts to contain Sudanese student and faculty activism, their work recovers contemporary strategies of resistance that range from continuing learning over WhatsApp to coordinating placements for displaced scholars and students. Ultimately, by bridging histories of pedagogy, political thought, development and underdevelopment, refugees, genocide, and beyond, this panel offers a multitude of ways of approaching scholasticide as an analytical tool. Yet it also suggests opportunities to channel solidarity into support for displaced colleagues and students from Sudan and beyond.

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