Monday, 29 April, 2024

The Network and Editorial Board of Surveillance & Society (S&S) and the Surveillance Studies Network (SSN) offers its unconditional support for our colleague, Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Queen Mary University of London.

We condemn the government of Israel’s unjustified and racist attack on Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s human rights and freedom of expression, which has so far included slander, libel and vilification, humiliation, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, violent interrogation, theft of her scholarly materials and work, and restrictions on her freedom of movement.

We condemn both Hebrew University and Queen Mary University for their failure to fully support Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s human and academic rights and freedoms. Such a failure to support the rights of one person is a failure to support the rights of all people. 

We note with alarm the widespread complicity and cowardice of many academic institutions worldwide, in the face not only of the targeting of individual scholars like Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian, but also the destruction by Israel of the entire educational infrastructure in the occupied Palestinian territory of Gaza. 

We reaffirm our support for courageous and necessary critical scholarship in the face of surveillance, oppression, and violence, the rights and freedoms of all scholars to research, teach and speak out according to their consciences. 

On behalf of the Network and Editorial Board of Surveillance & Society and the Surveillance Studies Network,https://surveillance-studies.net/about/

Professor David Murakami Wood, University of Ottawa 

Professor Torin Monahan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill