Producing Rooted Knowledge

Abstract Israeli universities’ discrimination against Palestinian students, the vast majority of whom are Israeli citizens, has been amply researched and documented. Some attention has also been given to these institutions’ small percentages of Palestinian staff. Yet the implications of these discriminatory practices for Palestinian students and staff with regard to psychological well-being, experiences of acquiring and producing knowledge, and the ethics of the research in which they participate as assistants, surveyors, or local informants have received little attention. These consequences can be traced by reading accounts of the daily experiences of Palestinian students and faculty members. Research on such experiences reveals that, overall, Palestinian students and faculty in Israeli universities have strong feelings of anxiety toward the spaces where they work and intellectual milieu in which they study and teach. These sites, therefore, could serve as good locations for reflecting on questions of positionality and contributing to thinking about the relationship between ethics and politics in knowledge production from a Palestinian perspective.