ACSA Cancellation of 79:2 JAE Issue on Palestine: Letter by the Theme Editors
Published
March 17, 2025
Open Letter to the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA)
RE. ACSA Cancellation of 79:2 Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) issue on Palestine
To the ACSA Board of Directors,
We came together as concerned editors to reflect on and respond to Israel’s genocidal onslaught against Palestinians in Gaza. To do otherwise, to remain silent about this gruesome, live streamed historical injustice and to fail to address its profound implications for theory and practice would amount to complicity and willful ignorance on our part.
With our call for papers now erased from the pages of JAE, it is worth reinstating the aims of the Palestine issue. With JAE’s 79:2 we sought to think with, from and in relation to Palestine to reflect on the global reverberations and social, political, economic, environmental implications of this historical juncture for design, research, and education in architecture. For more than a century, Palestine has been at the receiving and initiating ends of imperial and zionist formations of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide. In this moment of exceptional visibility, with wars, militarism, repression and authoritarianism ravaging communities and spaces the world over, our call invited contributions to consider and document architectural and spatial tools that participate in or are complicit in such formations. It also welcomed research on life-affirming infrastructures and resistance practices that refuse the political architectures of annihilation, containment, fragmentation, erasure, and designed uninhabitability. We also encouraged work to reflect on Palestine’s position in internationalist, decolonial constellations that shape geographies of shared struggle and futurities of abolition, freedom and liberation.
We were dismayed but not surprised to hear about the ACSA Board’s decision to cancel the Palestine issue. It was not that long ago that the ACSA summoned a meeting, where we and JAE Editorial Board members were expected to respond to a diatribe of questions concerning our call for papers. This inquisitorial gathering, let us remember, included queries such as ‘Does the call imply that Israel does not have a legitimate claim to its existence?’, ‘Does the language of the call communicate that wider constructive perspectives on the current conflict, historically or otherwise, are welcome?.’ Or ‘What were the editorial board’s conversations around reflections on settler colonialism or genocidal campaigns as more global and historically nuanced issues?’ and ‘Where is the acknowledgement of the role of Hamas or other organizations furthering conflict and violence in the region?’. Despite our protests of the anti-Palestinian nature of this line of interrogation, ACSA President Cathi Ho Schar proceeded to verbally ask us these questions as if they deserved answers. The ACSA Executive Committee did eventually apologise for this embarrassing and frankly demeaning exercise. We are, however, still puzzled about the unknown “external focus group”, and its role in the formulation of these questions after the board circulated our call in what can only be described as a shocking, unprofessional and unprecedented interference in the functions of JAE’s editorial board. Nevertheless, the timeline of ACSA’s interventions throughout this ordeal speaks for itself about the ACSA board’s subjacent intentions all along.
What is extraordinary is that the board’s decision to cancel the issue has been made without having read a single contribution or without consulting with us first. In other words, this act of censorship was not grounded in an informed decision about content, but was rather a preemptive attempt to solely silence and suppress knowledge production on Palestine. Along the way the board dismissed McLain Clutter, the JAE Interim Executive Editor, for refusing to implement your censorship decision. You also disparaged the labor and love of nearly a hundred scholars engaged as contributors, reviewers, and editors, particularly from the diligent, committed and professional editorial team of JAE. With more than 80 contributions, the issue was in advanced stages of review and publication.
Caving to external pressures, the ACSA chose a cowardly act of censorship rather than standing up for your organisation’s values at a critical time when at stake are fundamental principles of academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the production and circulation of knowledges that speak truth to power. This decision comes at a time of increasing governmental and institutional repression of students and staff in North America and Europe, who are articulating dissenting voices and organising against structural violence. The ACSA leadership has sacrificed the work of its peers and the values of its organisation and in doing so, it has fed into the frenzied atmosphere of a violently expanding anti-Palestinian racism and many other social injustices that have gripped all levels of Western society. They might also have assumed that we, the JAE’s editorial board, and the ACSA membership, together with other scholars and activists, would remain indifferent to this affront and dangerous precedent.
The cancellation of 79:2 marks a before and after in the history of the ACSA. This issue was not just about Palestine. It was a volume that galvanised the concerns and interests of a community of scholars grappling with the current political moment and preoccupied with documenting, recording and reflecting on the actors, logics, processes, forces and impacts of colonial and genocidal spatialities to help us think about abolitionist, liberatory and decolonial architectural futures. It is genuinely appalling that a professional organisation that asserts to be a reference in architectural education and claims to be preparing future architects, designers, and change agents – based on principles of equity and social justice through research, scholarship and creative practice – has shown such moral failings and disregard for professionalism, transparency and disconnection with reality in these pressing times.
We, the editors of the Palestine issue, stand in solidarity with the JAE Editorial Board in their collective resignation, and rejoin their letter and demands to call on the ACSA Board of Directors to immediately commit to a transparent review of the processes and policies that led to this violation of academic freedom. We also call on architects, urbanists, planners, geographers, allied scholars, and other social scientists concerned with spatialities of injustice and liberation, to write and urge the ACSA to correct its course, and to reconsider their affiliation with the organization and participation in their programs.
Let us emphasise this again. This is not exclusively a Palestine issue or concern, this is about standing against the silencing and criminalisation of knowledges that engage with colonised, racialised and precarious communities organising liberatory geographies at the center and in the peripheries during our late fascist times. While there has been a decades, if not centuries-long, war against anti-colonial knowledges, the recent intensification of attacks presents an opportunity not for complacency or preemptive obedience but for a strategic intellectual resistance and defense of our best chances at building free and just futures. As demonstrated by the recent abductions and deportation attempts by ICE of Mahmoud Khalil, Leqaa Kordia, and Ranjani Srinivasan, capitulation to repressive campaigns which attempt to silence student movements further intensify the risks we face as a community of scholars. Columbia is not the exception, and nor are attacks against Palestinians. Progressive voices in other campuses will be next on the list of governmental and retrograde forces that intend to destroy higher education.
Despite the egregious attempts at censorship across state, educational, research and cultural institutions, we will continue to stand in support of knowledge production and circulation about and for freedom and liberation struggles in Palestine and beyond. We urge the ACSA executive committee to come to its senses, stand on the right side of history, and repair the damage done to JAE, the ACSA and the broader community of students and scholars which will be impacted by these cowardly and racist measures.
The JAE 79:2 Palestine Issue Theme Editors
Nick Estes, Nora Akawi, Omar Jabary Salamanca, Zoé Samudzi
endorsed by the former 2025 JAE Editorial Board
To support the letter and join the JAE in our demands, sign here
Image by Amal Al-Nakhala