University of Minnesota: Support Professor Sima Shakhsari and MENA Faculty, Staff, and Students!

We are writing to request that the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, take immediate action to support for Professor Sima Shakhsari, and all of their Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students at the University of Minnesota. Professor Shakhsari is being subjected to a campaign of online and in-person harassment, including by other Professors at the University of Minnesota. Professor Shakhsari is a renowned scholar of transnational gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, who are themselves Iranian, Muslim, and queer. At a time when fields like Anthropology, Sociology, Race and Ethnic Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies have been expanding beyond Eurocentric analysis of gender and sexuality while increasingly striving to integrate people of color and global-south based paradigms, Dr. Shakhsari’s contributions lie at the cutting edge of multiple fields.

We demand the University of Minnesota take action to put a stop to the hateful targeting and bullying Dr. Shakhsari is experiencing this as a result of their educational work related to Palestine. These attacks in fact, are also an attack on the entire field of Gender and Women’s Studies. In this field, which was founded upon a commitment to publicly engaged social justice-based scholarship, there exists an academic consensus that the occupation of Palestine is a central feminist and queer concern.

We also demand that UMN administration respond to faculty, student, and staff demands and publicly and officially condemn doxxing, support Palestinian students, and protect staff and faculty jobs in the face of such doxxing.

The danger of this harassment is compounded by the fact that Dr. Shaksari is trans, and thus two virulent forms of hatred in the USA --Islamophobia and transphobia--are intersecting and amplifying each other in their case. Indeed, the attacks against Dr. Shakhsari are not isolated, but to connected to a broader pattern that is especially disconcerting at a public university whereby across the U.S. politically motivated groups are striving to suppress and delegitimize Professors teaching Critical Race Theory and Gender and Women’s Studies by painting their research and teaching as a threat to our society. To that end Dr Shakhsari has received death threats and threats of sexual violence via email, phone call, and in person.

As UMN students have made clear, Dr. Shakhsari is one of the few scholars on campus who provides complex and nuanced analysis of race, gender, sexuality, and ability in their research and teaching. They teach about racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism and how these forms of hatred are connected and similar to one another.

We call upon the University of Minnesota to publicly commit to the principles of academic freedom and free speech, and to state firmly that there is no Palestine exception to these principles.

We ask that UMN publicly support professors and students at UMN who are practicing solidarity with Palestinians, and state clearly that the university stands against the harassment, doxxing, and lies directed against Dr.Shakhsari. We repeat that as a Muslim, Iranian, Middle Eastern, trans scholar Professor Shakhsari lives at the intersection of several vulnerable groups in the United States. We also add that after two Palestinian UMN students were racially profiled at the airport and that a local shooter mentioned killing Iranians in recent weeks. UMN must explicitly stand in support of its campus communities, their academic freedom, and their safety.

We urge the university to publicly recognize the importance of both Professor Shakhsari’s intellectual and community work, particularly their community and mentorship work for Muslim, Middle Eastern, queer and trans students at UMN.

We demand that UMN also stop its discrimination against other Arab and Muslim members of the UMN community. Indeed, the administration’s firing of an Afghan staff member in recent weeks reinforces the sense that people from the MENA region and Muslims in general are not welcome or supported at UMN.