Jodi A. Byrd
Research Project
Scholasticide in and Beyond Palestine
Project Team:
2026 – 2028
This photo, reportedly taken in a library at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza City, circulated on social media in May 2024 and prompted an Israeli military investigation.
Key Question
How does a mixed-methods approach of research and comparison illuminate “scholasticide” as a category of analysis?
Project Summary
Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this project will use a mixed-methods approach in undertaking empirical research and comparative analysis to investigate “scholasticide” as a critical category for political and historical analysis. In addition to the resident research team, the project will involve a sequence of virtual visiting fellows.
Since October 2023, all twelve of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed, and hundreds of university students and dozens of academic and university staff have been killed. This destruction amounts to what scholars have called “scholasticide,” part of a concerted attack on collective life and social regeneration in Palestine. Building on a pilot documentation project at the University of Chicago, Scholasticide in and Beyond Palestine is a two-year collaboration bringing together scholars from the US, Palestine, and the UK to collect and analyze data on the history of Palestinian higher education in the Gaza Strip and the many dimensions of the recent phases of scholasticide. The project will also engage in theoretical development of the scholasticide concept through a comparative approach to attacks on education and social regeneration under settler/racial regimes, especially among Black and Indigenous communities in North America.
Research Team
Alireza Doostdar
Alireza Doostdar
Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion
University of Chicago
Eve L. Ewing
Eve L. Ewing
Associate Professor, Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity
University of Chicago
Darryl Li
Mezna Qato
Mezna Qato
Director of the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies at Newnham College
University of Cambridge
Sarah Ali
Ahmed Abu Shaban
Ahmed Abu Shaban
Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine
Al-Azhar University–Gaza
Ahmed Kamal Junina
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