Revolutionary Blueprints:
The Question of Palestine Is a Question of Pedagogy
How can teachers align our pedagogies with the Palestinian freedom struggle and other movements for indigenous liberation? Scholar, teacher, and poet Dina Omar joins us to follow this question into the many others it opens up — from decisions about language and representation, to the exhaustion of social suffering paradigms, to the psychological effects of occupation and eliminatory violence.
About Our Guest
Dina Omar is a writer, artist, teacher, poet, and ethnographer. Currently finishing her doctoral dissertation at Yale University, Dina comes to her scholarship and teaching through long commitment to grassroots community building. She is one of the founding members of National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP), and she spent several years as a writer-teacher-poet with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People in the Bay Area. Amid renewed Israeli military attacks on the community of Sheik Jarrah in May 2021, Dina was one of the co-authors of the Palestine and Praxis letter to affirm and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle as an indigenous liberation movement confronting a settler colonial state. Her scholarship focuses on the politics of mental health in areas of extreme surveillance–most immediately, she is studying and writing about how Arab young people are psychologized as a part of, and as an effect of, the conditions of surveillance and carcerality they endure. Dina is one of the most sensitive and generous minds that we know, and it is an honor to have her on the podcast.
Credits: Outro music is “Hemlock” by Akrasis. Find their amazing catalog here. Episode photo by Corleone Brown on Unsplash.
