Phenomenologies of Silence: On the Palestine Exception and the Complicity of Social Work Academe

In this submission, four social work academics explore the silence on genocide in Palestine. Through collaborative autoethnography, we document our experiences of being silenced in the academic context of existent silences within faculties of social work in Canada. Over several conversations, we came together to engage in intentional community and solidarity. This space became an embodiment of sumud, wherein we resist by breathing life into our stories, bearing witness to one another in our full humanity. Employing an analysis informed by anti-colonial and critical race theories, we locate our experiences in broader structures of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism. Attending to phenomenologies of the Palestine exception, we offer counterstories to combat this silencing. We engage themes of guilt and resistance, and explore inner realities of soul and spirit which are crushed by this violence. The disorienting silence of social work in the academy reflects its complicity. Palestine is treated as an abstract, and Palestinians as an abstraction—removed in literal and figurative ways from homeland, from conversations about social justice, and from reality. Silencing is erasure and is yet another step in the genocidal project. Through this submission, we extend our voices to the calls for a Free Palestine. We refuse to be silent, and we refuse to be silenced.