Freedom of Expression in a Time of Genocide

17.00 - 17.45 "The Questions of Palestine and Academic Freedom" Lecture by Sindre Bangstad

18.00 - 19.30 Digital symposium with internationale experts Raz Segal, Zoe Samudzi, Maha Abdallah, and Martin Shaw

Sindre Bangstad is a Norwegian social anthropologist, and Reseach Professor at KIFO, Oslo. He was a 2022-3 Stanley Kelley Jr Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Teaching of Anthropology at Princeton University, and the recipient of the 2019 Anthropology in the Media Awards (AIMW). The author of ten monographs and edited volumes, he has as part of ongoing research on the 2016 IHRA WDA published the essay “Palestine, Israel and academic freedom in South Africa” in HERRI#11 Sept 2025, and the article “The Palestine Exception to Academic Freedom and the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism” in The Journal Of Imperial and Commonwealth History 53 (3) 2025: 689-700. Bangstad will also publish an 80 pp. research report on the topic in late 2025.

Raz Segal is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University, where he also serves as director of the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies (MAHG). He is also founder and co-coordinator of the Refugee Studies Initiative at Stockton. Focusing on central and southeast Europe, Dr. Segal is engaged in his work with the challenges of exploring the Holocaust as an integral part of late modern processes of imperial collapse, the formation and occasional de-formation of nation-states, and their devastating impact on the societies they sought --- and still seek --- to break and remake. Dr. Segal has held a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lady Davis Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His publications include Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016; paperback 2020), and he was guest editor of the special issue on Genocide: Mass Violence and Cultural Erasure of Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly, vol. 138 (June 2018) (Hebrew). Dr. Segal has also published book reviews, op-eds, and larger articles on genocide, state violence, and memory politics in Hebrew and English in Haaretz and +972 Magazine.

Zoé Samudzi is a sociologist with a PhD in Medical Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco and an MSc in Health, Community, and Development from the London School of Economics. Her research is primarily concerned with German imperialism, the Ovaherero and Nama genocide and its afterlives, and settler colonialism in southern Africa (and coloniality across the continent more broadly). Other topics of research engagement includes visuality and violence, the ethics of seeing and witnessing, human remains and restitution, biomedicalization and ancestry, genocide memory and denialism, and the spatialities of racecraft and dispossession. Samudzi is also an associate editor with Parapraxis Magazine, a popular magazine dedicated to pyschoanalytic thinking, and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents. For her work at Jewish Currents, she received a 2023 Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Arts from the American Jewish Press Association for her review about the controversies around the most recent Philip Guston retrospective. She is an art critic and writer whose work has appeared in Artforum, the Funambulist, Protean Magazine, Errant Journal, The New Republic, Architectural Review, and other outlets. Currently, she has a Curatorial Research Fellowship with Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, she is an artist-in-residence with the Pressing Matter project in the Netherlands, and she was also the 2023 awardee for the Black Reconstruction Collective’s artist prize.

Maha Abdallah is a graduate teaching assistant and a PhD researcher in the Faculty of Law, University of Antwerp. Her research investigates Zionism, settler colonialism, and the genocide of the Palestinian people. She has martinshaw.org and he is on Twitter and Substack @martinshawx.



A collaboration between Future Pasts Group at the University of Stavanger and Ytringsfrihetsbyen Stavanger. Ytringsfrihetsbyen Stavanger is a Stavanger2025 project.