Talk: "Resurging Pro-Power Pedagogies" by Jodi Melamed

• Event Date: Thursday, November 19, 2026
• Time: 5:00 pm–6:30 pm (CST)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL

• Talk

This talk contends that attacks on Palestine campus movements were never meant only to silence criticism of Israel. They have always been about producing alignment with a financialized, technology-driven permanent war and reconstruction economy of militarized accumulation under autocratic rule. I argue that these repressive strategies serve to institute pro-power pedagogies at U.S. universities and beyond. They teach the superiority of the powerful in a time of rule by capitalist autocrats. They forbid critiques of power in a time of genocide. They revive colonial divisions of humanity that allow oppressors to appear as victims and the survival imperatives of oppressed communities as security threats. Luckily, resurging pro-power pedagogies are losing ground in the face of the grammar Palestinian resistance provides for joining struggles and prefiguring and inhabiting alternatives to colonial racial capitalist orders.