Utopian methods and the question of Palestine
Shirin Vossoughi
The following reflections were shared as part of a panel organized by the Cultural Historical Activity Theory SIG on the topic of Speculative Utopian Future-Making. I have been thinking about our roles as educators and scholars in these times and in relation to our disciplines. I decided to print the text of the talk here in that spirit. Thank you to those who provided feedback on earlier drafts. Any missteps are mine.
It’s an honor to be invited to discuss Speculative Utopian Future-Making with this incredible group of scholars. As I thought about what words could matter to offer today, I found it impossible for me to speak on utopian methodologies without addressing what is currently unfolding in Palestine. So I will use my seven minutes to share some of the questions I have been wrestling with as an educator, scholar, and mother, and as an Iranian who comes from a history of political resistance, repression, and dreaming.
I have been asking myself: What does it mean to engage in the crucial, imaginative work of educational world-building amidst the ongoing U.S. and Israeli war on the people of Gaza and the West Bank? The number of Palestinians killed, injured, disabled, and displaced in the last three months, particularly among children, is at a scale unseen in recent wars. The bombing of schools and universities, hospitals, mosques, churches, homes, agricultural lands, bakeries, libraries, aid trucks and refugee camps, the killing of over 100 journalists, the starvation of two million people, half of whom are children, and the ways it has been boasted about by numerous Israeli officials, reestablish devastating precedents for what we will collectively tolerate and normalize, and for whom. Tomorrow, South Africa will present the case for Israel’s violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice.
As Noura Erakat reminds us, such violence is not only about the crushing number of deaths, it is also about the destruction of places, communities, memories, relationships, learning environments, histories and possible futures—the very social and psychological phenomena many of us have dedicated our lives to studying. The tender and imaginative work of world-building must include the principled refusal of what Erakat calls world-shattering.
Our speculative methodologies are often rightly concerned with co-creating the conditions for people to dream and enact possible worlds. Yet our current realities have been pushing me to ask: what should we be helping make impossible? What kinds of pedagogies are needed to make such calculated violence unimaginable? What are our responsibilities to the forms of learning and ethical development such a future would require?
If we are to imagine societies free of colonial violence, we must contend with how such organized dehumanization and dispossession becomes permissible. Palestine is teaching me that we may be better at pursuing this question historically than in real-time, leading me to worry about the worlds we are working towards if we can’t be clear about our basic values and ethical grounds. As cultural psychologists, we ought to ask: how have the systematic biases and generalizations drawn from narrow, homogenous samples amplified the humanity of a privileged minority while disfiguring the minds and personhoods of the global majority? How do such scientized myths and scholarly complicities help create the epistemic basis for a system of occupation and apartheid to brand itself as the “only democracy in the Middle East?”
Vygotskian thought has both reproduced and powerfully challenged the ways cultural and epistemic supremacy disguised as universal truth shapes the questions we ask, the methods we use, and the conclusions we draw about human cognition and activity. Many of those here today are working to forge the paradigm shifts that would require any sound study of human learning and mind to seriously engage with the phenomenally constitutive roles of culture, history, power and ethics, to refuse the hierarchical ordering of life, to expose supremacy as ethically and intellectually bereft. Unscientific. Yet our politicians, newsrooms, and university trustees continue to tell a much different story, requiring us to continue to ask: who counts as human?
A question closely tethered to another: What should our children be learning about the violence enacted on their siblings in Palestine? I have been wrestling for some time with how our conceptions of educational equity often advance U.S.-centric views of racial justice, and fail to seriously contend with questions of empire. I have learned that raising this concern is controversial because it troubles the premise of striving to be included in the American project, and because it requires seriously examining the purposes of education and the complicities of seemingly neutral disciplinary practices and knowledge systems.
Where would we be today if “never again” also applied to the truthful study of U.S. interventions in places like Vietnam, Guatemala, the Philippines, Chile, and Iraq? If students were taught about U.S. support for apartheid South Africa and the forms of boycott, divestment, and solidarity that brought it to an end? If the design of bombs and weaponry was consigned to STEM history and ethics curricula rather than a mundane and unquestioned part of 21st century engineering education? What kinds of alternative presents would we be witnessing if students were well-versed in the poetry of Hiba Abu Nada and Refaat Alareer? If they had access to the rich histories of anti-zionist Jewish organizing, of Black and Native solidarity with Palestine? If they were routinely supported to see the world from the perspective of what is life-giving rather than extractive? I have spent enough time with children to know that the second path is dominant but forced.
We can see strong glimmers of these possibilities in mass protests and student organizing for Palestine, and in the role access to alternative narratives has played in such mobilizations. As utopian methodologists we ought to be well-practiced at perceiving such transformative seeds, and at supporting students and educators to draw connections between empire and the forms of racial violence and settler colonialism that define their own societies. I live in a city named after John Evans, a man responsible for the Sand Creek Massacre, and I work in a university founded by profit gleaned from the destruction of Cheyenne and Arapaho lives. Yet our institution doesn’t adequately teach its own history, the ethical responsibilities we hold towards these tribes, and towards the Council of the Three Fires and Indigenous sovereignty and futurity in the lands where we study and work. The middle school students in our summer program in Evanston are often 11 or 12 years old before they learn the story of the name of their town. Their inquisitive responses and desires to be in right relations help me understand why. Anti-woke counter-movements are a real reflection of what people with power know will change through different stories. The targeting of poets, writers, and journalists has always told its own truths: the censors and assassins are afraid of words.
The scale of repression currently unfolding in our schools and universities pulls our collective energies away from the more urgent questions of what is to be taught, and how. As I teach my 8 year old the meaning of “genocide” and “apartheid” and consider which videos she should be allowed to watch given what feeds her nightmares, I know that these are not simple pedagogical questions. I know that the images make what is already unimaginable to her a brutal reality of what grown-ups can do in a world that tells children her age to solve their problems with words. I need to teach her that when CNN and the New York Times say it is too complex they are hiding what is plain to see, but I need her to know that the complexity of decolonial struggle that refuses to discard anyone’s humanity is real, and worthy of our life’s breath.
Marxist and Vygotksian traditions have raised me to understand that human becoming is historically shaped and open to change, and that relational conditions can make the impossible breathe. What are the relational conditions that can undercut the fragile power of repression? What would it look like now if our fields were to respond in ways that do justice to the lives of Palestinian children and families? What do our answers mean for our current activity? What alternate precedents can be set? What changes will make other changes and forms of living possible?
