Rama Ali Kased, Ed. D
Abstract:
Drawing on critical autoethnography and pedagogical field notes, this article examines how an ethnic studies classroom became a site of witnessing, collective meaning-making, and political formation during the first months of the genocide in Gaza. Beginning with the October 17, 2023 bombing of Al Ahli Hospital, I reflect on teaching as a Palestinian professor at San Francisco State University while navigating the tensions between intellectual labor, grief, and political responsibility. I argue that the genocide revealed ethnic studies to be not simply a field of study, but a living and evolving pedagogical praxis capable of responding to unfolding crises by transforming grief, guilt, and witnessing into critical consciousness and collective action.
Through an examination of classroom discussions, pedagogical observations, and relational encounters with students, I demonstrate how emotions became generative sites of critical inquiry rather than barriers to learning. The article shows how students connected Palestine to broader histories of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, abolition, Indigenous sovereignty, and migrant justice, while collectively interrogating questions of complicity, responsibility, and liberation. I further argue that the classroom functioned as one of the trenches of struggle, where the political analysis, relationships, and commitments cultivated through ethnic studies informed students’ participation in the San Francisco State Gaza solidarity encampment and the broader divestment movement. In doing so, this article advances an understanding of ethnic studies as a living praxis that moves beyond the classroom, cultivating the forms of critical consciousness, relational care, and collective responsibility necessary for liberation.
Introduction
On the morning of October 17, 2023, I began my day as usual, moving through the familiar routines of getting myself and my children ready and dropping them off at school. It was during this morning routine that I received news through social media and family and friends’ group threads about the bombing of Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza. As I continued through the rhythms of preparing for the day, I was simultaneously trying to process the devastating images and reports emerging from Gaza. The night before, I had stayed up late preparing for my Ethnic Studies course on racial capitalism at San Francisco State University (SFSU), a class I had developed and taught for several years. That day’s lecture, titled “Marx and Robinson Chop It Up,” examined the convergences and tensions between Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism and Cedric Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism. Yet by mid-October, preparing for class had become increasingly difficult. On that day, my thoughts were elsewhere, consumed by the escalating violence in Gaza and the genocide unfolding on the Palestinians. As I reviewed my lecture notes that morning, the distance between the concepts I planned to teach and the realities unfolding on my phone screen seemed to collapse entirely.
My lecture was in less than an hour yet I felt unable to move or to breathe, unable to fathom how I was supposed to stand in front of students and teach theory while Palestinians were pulling their loved ones from rubble in real time. Still, I walked into the classroom. Forty-five students sat quietly in their seats. Many wore kuffiyehs. Many were staring down at their phones, seeing images and videos they could not unsee, their faces marked by fear, anger, and confusion. The room felt heavy with anticipation and grief—anticipation because they were looking to me for answers, for reassurance, for language that could make sense of what was happening. Early in my teaching career, I realized that many of my students enroll in my classes because they were drawn not only to the subject matter but also to the prospect of learning from a Palestinian professor, perhaps the first Palestinian teacher many of them had ever encountered.
On that particular day, my presence in the classroom carried a weight that exceeded the content of the syllabus. My course had been designed before October 7, before the sheer magnitude of violence in Gaza became the defining reality shaping our collective everyday experience. The frameworks we were studying—racial capitalism, settler colonialism, power, and resistance—were no longer only historical or analytical concepts. They became clarifying lenses through which we were attempting to understand the profound violence before us and the uncertainty of our historical moment. As my students looked to me, I understood that their focus was not trained on racial capitalism or settler colonialism as theorized in the materials I assigned for that day. They were looking for guidance on how to live through witnessing atrocity in real time, and what it means to continue learning, teaching, and organizing while doing so.
It has been nearly three years since my students, and I came together in the space of that ethnic studies classroom at San Francisco State University. In a sense, I taught the course, but this statement does not do justice to what transpired in our classroom. Teaching as usual was impossible in Fall 2023. That classroom experience compelled me to fundamentally reconceive what I understand to be the pedagogy and praxis of ethnic studies in times shaped by profound structural violence. In what follows, I offer what I call “field notes” from a space of education that was inextricable from the act of witnessing and the urgency to organize—a space that became something far more consequential than the typical classroom. My reflections are informed by pedagogical observations, classroom conversations, and teaching notes. I do not treat classroom interactions as neutral data points, but as relational encounters shaped by history, power, emotion, and lived experience (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018; Smith, 2012).
In the critical autoethnographic reflection that follows, I examine how students navigated grief, political consciousness, and solidarity as Palestinians in Gaza endured a genocide unfolding in real time across both physical and digital landscapes. I maintain that the genocide in Gaza catalyzed a transformation of the ethnic studies classroom into a living pedagogical space where students and educators collectively made meaning of violence, transformed grief into critical consciousness, and practiced solidarity as an ethical and political commitment. Significantly, this course took place in the months leading up to the San Francisco State University Gaza solidarity encampment, which ultimately contributed to a successful student-led divestment campaign. As such, the classroom served not only as a space of critical reflection but also as a site where students developed the political analysis, relationships, and commitments that informed their engagement in collective action beyond the university classroom.
When the Lesson Changed
There are moments in teaching when the world outside the classroom demands that we reconsider what, when, and how we teach. These moments reveal the power of ethnic studies as a living and evolving practice and one that does not ask educators to retreat from the realities of the world, but to engage and intervene in real time. On October 17, 2023, as news of the bombing of Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza emerged, the lesson I had planned became secondary to the urgent need to collectively process, analyze, and make meaning of the violence unfolding before us. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I did not teach the lesson that I had painstakingly planned, at least not as I had initially envisioned. This is the hard-won latitude afforded to ethnic studies practitioners. Thanks to those who struggled to establish the field, paving the way for us to teach today, our classrooms are spaces where we engage the world in which we live, the world where we struggle to survive, and the world which we organize collectively to transform.
On that day, my students and my discussion of racial capitalism did not begin with the concept itself. Instead, we turned organically to what we were witnessing as our starting point, searching for a shared vocabulary to understand the violence unfolding in Gaza. We discussed how systems of oppression—genocide, Zionism, dispossession—are not isolated but interconnected and mutually reinforcing, sustained through state violence, borders, surveillance, and the devaluation of racialized life. We also explored the practice of resistance and principled solidarity: what it means to stand with oppressed peoples not out of charity or symbolism, but through an understanding that shared struggle is foundational to collective liberation.
I did not do much of the talking that day. The students led the class. It was as if they understood that I was struggling to be present in the way professors are expected to “perform” presence: composed, authoritative, and emotionally contained. Instead, they carried the discussion, allowing me, perhaps for the first time in my teaching career, to simply listen. They spoke with urgency and clarity about what they were witnessing online. Their care was palpable—not only in their questions and engagement of the material, but also, in their holding space for me as a Palestinian professor navigating the grief of witnessing the destruction of my people. Yet this care was not one-directional. I felt an equally profound responsibility to care for my students and to hold space for their grief, confusion, and desire to understand.
Palestine mattered deeply to them, not as a distant geopolitical issue, but as a struggle they understood through connections to movements for racial justice, Indigenous sovereignty, migrant justice, abolition, and other struggles against structural inequality. Some connected Palestine to Black liberation struggles, Indigenous dispossession, immigration raids, and policing. These connections were neither incidental nor distractions from the intended content of the course; they reflected the core commitments of ethnic studies, which equips students to understand contemporary forms of violence and resistance through historical, relational, and structural analyses of power. Ethnic studies also teaches us that the work of liberation requires the willingness to pivot and to respond to the world as it unfolds, to center what communities are experiencing, and to allow the pursuit of justice to reshape our pedagogical practices.
The Pedagogy of Grief and Guilt
October 7, 2023 dematerialized the separation between intellectual labor and activism and the distinction between anger and anguish. Teaching theories of power, exploitation, resistance, and racial capitalism while simultaneously witnessing the destruction of Palestinian life on a massive scale, I experienced firsthand the tensions between the always necessary work of analysis, the urgency of collective response in the face of genocide, and the immobilizing weight of grief. Yet there was something powerful about being in a classroom with a community of students who were also navigating grief and uncertainty, and who responded with care, solidarity, and a desire to act. Their willingness and bravery to be present, to extend care toward me and toward one another, and to hold space for collective grieving made the unbearable more bearable.
Already structured around Palestine, Zionism, and settler colonialism, my Fall 2023 course was designed from the outset to examine Palestine as a site through which to understand broader systems of capitalism, imperialism, and racialized oppression. However, it was the bombing of Al Ahli Hospital, ten days into the Zionist genocide in Gaza, that marked a rupture in my ethnic studies classroom. Although 7,450 miles away from Gaza City where Al Ahli Hospital is located, my classroom could not escape the reverberations of the deliberate killing of patients, medical staff, and refugees who had sought refuge in its confines. Perhaps it was because of what the targeted destruction of the hospital signaled to the world: associated with care, healing, and the preservation of human life, the hospital became a devastating symbol of the genocidal logic unfolding before us. Perhaps it was because the images and testimonies emerging from Gaza were immediately accessible through social media, allowing students and young people around the world to encounter the violence in real time, bringing what was distant so near. Or perhaps it was because that particular class meeting coincided with that terrible devastation, rendering our classroom into a coextensive space where students could collectively process what they were witnessing and feeling. Whatever the reason, something shifted, burst open, and was laid bare before us. On that day, the dynamic in our classroom changed. Students carried into our shared space a level of grief, shock, and urgency I had not witnessed before. Their questions were deeply ethical, palpably emotional, and unmistakably political.
In Teaching to Transgress (1994), bell hooks challenges the ideology and the performance of neutrality in education, arguing that transformative pedagogy requires educators and students to bring their full selves into the classroom. For hooks, the practice of freedom depends upon authenticity, vulnerability, and a willingness to engage the intellectual, emotional, and political dimensions of learning. For me, this was never particularly difficult. As a Palestinian scholar and ethnic studies educator, I have always understood teaching and learning as inseparable from lived experience, community accountability, and struggles for justice. Yet in the aftermath of October 7, bringing my full self into the classroom was freighted with a different significance. What did the fact of my Palestinianness mean to my students in a time when my people were and continue to be systematically targeted for elimination? What did the collective implications of my “full self” mean in our classroom? What did it mean to show up not only as a professor, but as a Palestinian, a mother, an organizer, and someone grieving in real time? The genocide unfolding in Gaza made it impossible to maintain even the illusion of distance between the material I was teaching and the realities my students and I were witnessing in real time.
The openness of the ethnic studies classroom created a space where I could be fully human at a moment when Palestinians were being systematically dehumanized. Where my sadness, anger, grief, and militancy in the pursuit of liberation were not contradictions to intellectual rigor but part of the knowledge we were producing together. I did not have to hide my tears, soften my anger, or distance myself from the urgency of the moment in order to teach. In that space, I came to understand that vulnerability is not the absence of authority; rather, it can become a foundation for deeper connection, collective learning, and solidarity.
What stood out most that day was the rawness of the students’ grief—and mine—and their movement toward collective understanding and action. Grief bound my students and me together, holding us in ethical relationship with each other and the world whose horrors we could not escape. I call the complex emotions we felt “grief,” which comes from the Latin gravis or “weighty,” because it registers the almost physical heaviness of our collective anguish. What did it mean to witness cataclysmic violence happening from afar yet playing out, almost intimately, on our phones in live time? What did it mean to reckon with the formidable might of the genocidal Zionist war machine? How did we contend with helplessness, rage, and a consuming sense of loss?
I remember one class when we discussed the martyrdom of Palestinian poet and educator Refaat Alareer. As we reflected on his life, his work, and the circumstances of his killing, I struggled to hold back tears. Eventually, I could not. Several students were crying as well. We sat together in silence before slowly beginning to talk again—not only about the loss of a beloved writer and teacher, but about what it meant to witness the systematic destruction of Palestinian intellectual, cultural, and academic life. That moment did not interrupt learning; our shared grief became the lesson itself. That day, grief did not suspend pedagogy; grief became pedagogy. Sitting together in that moment, we were reminded that knowledge is not only produced through analysis, but through our embodied relationships to the world and to one another.
Rather than separating emotional response from intellectual inquiry, feminist and ethnic studies scholars have long argued that affect, embodiment, and lived experience are important sources of knowledge that deepen critical understanding (Collins, 2000; hooks, 1994; Lorde, 1984). In the aftermath of October 7, grief and guilt did not just color the discussions in my ethnic studies classroom; these entwined emotions became entry points for deeper analysis. For many of my students, witnessing the genocide generated difficult questions about complicity, responsibility, and powerlessness. They responded with anger and horror at the grinding lethal violence of the genocide, but also, a growing awareness of their own location within the political, economic, and social systems that make such violence possible.
I, too, struggled with guilt. Guilt that while Palestinians in Gaza were fighting for survival, I remained at a physical remove from the violence. Guilt that teaching, writing, and organizing often felt painfully inadequate, if not pointless, in the face of mass death and destruction. And profound guilt that despite global outrage and a proliferation of efforts—legal, international, investigative, grassroots, armed—around the world, we could not stop the genocide unfolding before us. Yet the guilt that surfaced in my classroom also became the basis of critical analysis and reflection. It became, in other words, pedagogical. Rather than treating guilt as an individual matter, my students and I examined it as a political feeling produced by witnessing profound injustice while occupying different locations within systems of power. Following Sara Ahmed (2004), emotions are not merely private experiences but social and political forces that shape how subjects understand responsibility, belonging, and action. My Fall 2023 classroom became a space where we collectively examined what our feelings revealed about our entanglements with structural violence and ethical responsibilities to one another. This process sustained me during one of the most difficult moments of my teaching career, and I observed how it also sustained my students as we navigated the range of emotions we carried during this period. Through a pedagogy of grief and guilt, we recognized that painful emotions were not barriers to learning but became generative spaces where we examined our responsibility to confront systems of violence and cultivate forms of collective action rooting in mourning.
From the Trenches of the Struggle
As students encountered images and testimonies from Gaza in real time, our classroom became a space where they could process grief, uncertainty, and political urgency while developing the analytical tools to understand the conditions that produced the violence they were witnessing. In this sense, witnessing—far more than an act of seeing—became a starting point for grappling with the obligations, contradictions, and accountability that emerge from structural critique. Witnessing and reflection were therefore inseparable from the praxis of solidarity and the clarity to act. Not simply an expression of empathy or connection to others, solidarity is a practice of reflection and action rooted in collective responsibility for liberation (Freire, 1970). If witnessing prompts us to ask, “What is happening?” solidarity requires us to ask, “How am I situated within these systems?” and “What responsibilities emerge from what I now understand?” (Mohanty, 2003). Through this process, students connected struggles across histories and geographies while examining the entanglements of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, displacement, militarization, and state violence (Robinson, 1983; Melamed, 2015; Wolfe, 2006).
The classroom itself became one of the trenches of this struggle. Not removed from political realities, our classroom served as a site where students and I confronted questions of power, responsibility, and liberation in relation to Palestine. Students often entered the classroom with the latest news from Gaza and updates they had read that morning, videos they had seen online, or conversations they had with family and community members. They brought the urgency of the moment and the realities of the world with them. In our classroom, we pushed one another to grapple with difficult questions while working together toward understanding. Rarely were these conversations easy; they required us to sit with uncertainty, discomfort, grief, and competing emotions while remaining committed to the collective work of imagining possibilities for justice.
Within this space, my students honed critical tools to understand violence beyond its surface expressions—to understand it structurally. Our classroom functioned as a powerful space where historical memory, political education, and solidarity converged. Students drew on movement knowledge to interpret the present moment, framing contemporary movements for Palestinian freedom within histories of anticolonial liberation struggles against racial capitalism. Time and again, they returned to the question of what it means to practice solidarity in moments of crisis. Rather than studying movements just as historical events, students positioned themselves within a time that called for action, a time of genocide in which the stakes of past and present struggles for liberation were, on the one hand, subjected to lies and distortions and, on the other, clearer than ever. Many were also aware of ongoing political attacks on ethnic studies and understood that Palestine had become a site of contestation within repressive campaigns to police knowledge production and restrict critical inquiry, especially into colonialism, racism, and state violence.
My students’ engagement with Palestine in the classroom was part of a time-honored tradition of global Palestinian solidarity organizing. Palestinian scholars have documented the importance of transnational organizing and political education, and revolutionary solidarity in sustaining struggles for liberation across generations and geographic boundaries (Abdulhadi, 2018; Erakat, 2019; Qutami, 2021; Zahzah, 2024). In this sense, students were not simply responding to a current event, nor was our classroom separate from the broader movement; it was one of its sites of formation. The relationships, political analysis, and commitments cultivated in our classroom were organically interconnected with the emergence of the SFSU Gaza solidarity encampment and the broader student-led divestment campaign. The encampment did not signal a departure from classroom learning, but rather an enactment of it—a movement from reflection toward action and from analysis toward praxis. Together, the classroom and encampment became spaces where students practiced the central commitments of ethnic studies: naming systems of power, building collective knowledge, and imagining possibilities for transformation.
The Encampment as Praxis
As a scholar-activist committed to using my institutional role and intellectual labor in the service of movement building, I understand teaching to be a political responsibility. I have long believed that the classroom can be a site where students learn to critique systems of power while developing the consciousness, relationships, and collective commitments necessary to transform them. This requires taking seriously students’ radical imaginations and their capacity to envision and build alternatives rooted in justice, liberation, and collective care (Kelley, 2002). Rather than viewing students as passive recipients of knowledge, I understand them as intellectual and political actors whose ideas, experiences, and organizing practices contribute to the ongoing work of liberation.
Teaching during the genocide in Palestine fundamentally affirmed my understanding of what this commitment required. It forced me to confront the responsibilities of teaching in a moment when the historical structures of violence we study were exposed in real time. These field notes trace an itinerary between my Fall 2023 classroom and the emergence of the SFSU Gaza solidarity encampment in Spring 2024. However circuitous or indirect, the trajectory between my ethnic studies classroom and the encampment was shaped by an imperative to enact justice from a position of complicity. My students wrestled with what it meant to live within systems of violence while refusing to accept complicity as inevitable. Their participation in collective action emerged from a desire to challenge the structures that normalized their proximity to injustice.
While grappling with grief, guilt, and uncertainty, my students navigated what collective responsibility could mean as a practice. Their willingness to speak openly about Palestine and to tie it to other struggles for liberation was not simply a reflection of classroom trust; it was connected to the broader political tradition of ethnic studies as a field created through demands for education where marginalized communities can name, analyze, and transform the conditions shaping their lives. In this respect, my students demonstrated themselves to be ethnic studies practitioners. Their taking part in the encampment, which launched a few months after the conclusion of the semester, was not separable from the ethnic studies classroom; rather, it represented an extension of the critical consciousness, ethical relationality, and political commitments cultivated through ethnic studies pedagogy. The encampment was a site where students enacted the praxis of solidarity developed through classroom dialogue that synthesized historical analysis, lived experience, and collective action.
These lines of connection between classroom and encampment illustrate how ethnic studies converts learning into praxis and affirms education as a powerful practice of liberation. To no small degree, the student encampments at San Francisco State University and across the globe reshaped the landscape of public discourse on Palestine. These student-led movements brought questions of Palestinian liberation out of the shadows into spaces where they had long been marginalized or silenced. As a form of pedagogy, student organizing helped to catalyze awareness of the imperial boomerang of Zionist genocide. By challenging dominant narratives, they are part of the collective work of imagining alternative futures.
An Ode to the Student Intifada
In the face of genocide, students almost everywhere, including my students at San Francisco State University, rose up. These students put their education and futures on the line because they understood that solidarity, even as it builds from a foundation of commitment, requires risk. It is no exaggeration to state that their clarity and courage sustained me during these terrible times. This reflection is an ode to the student movement for Palestine—to what many have called a new generation of student intifada. It is a recognition of the students who stepped, with their eyes wide open, into a long genealogy of struggle and refused to remain silent in the face of violence and injustice. As I walked onto my campus and witnessed students organize, I saw a movement grounded in an urgent sense of the present as well as deep historical consciousness.
Having myself organized around Palestine as a college student, I was struck by the deep reach of my students’ political analysis. They were not simply responding to a moment; they understood themselves as part of a lineage of students who had organized for Palestinian liberation, against colonialism, and for justice across generations. And indeed, their organizing was a form of solidarity praxis rooted in the belief that collective action across historical time can transform conditions of oppression (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994; Mohanty, 2003). Students repeatedly invoked those who came before them—the organizers and activists whose movement work paved the way for the struggles they were now carrying forward. Their organizing reflected an understanding that movements are forged through continuous collective struggle.
Yet this movement also reminded me that teaching and learning are never one-directional. The same students who entered my classroom seeking language to understand the violence unfolding in Gaza became teachers in their own right, and their classroom was the world. They taught all of us, during a time when a politics of fear was everywhere on display, courageous lessons about what it means to practice solidarity when the stakes are so high. They reminded me that ethnic studies is not simply a body of knowledge we transmit or a matter of educational training, but a living tradition continuously reshaped through collective struggle. Ethnic studies was not simply represented through the presence of ethnic studies faculty, our undergraduate majors, and the broad diversity of communities at the encampment. It was actively embodied through the relationships, political education, and collective care that helped sustain the movement. This commitment reflected what ethnic studies has always emphasized: that knowledge is produced through struggle and that education is inseparable from liberation.
We could not stop the genocide in Gaza, and this recognition is freighted with profound grief and responsibility. Yet by disrupting business as usual, the student intifada challenged dominant narratives that have long normalized or obscured Palestinian suffering. Refusing to tolerate the mass slaughter of the Palestinian people, students shifted the ground beneath conversations about Palestine. They asserted relationality—solidarity—with Gaza in keeping a broader tradition of student movements that have challenged universities, governments, and systems of power. In this, they rose up as a new generation carrying forward the unfinished work of liberation.
Rama Ali Kased is an Associate Professor of Race and Resistance Studies in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. A scholar, educator, and seasoned community organizer, Dr. Kased’s work focuses on Ethnic Studies, racial justice, critical consciousness, and liberatory pedagogy. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, and Palestinian, Dr. Kased has spent over two decades building transformative educational spaces and organizing across major cities in the United States. Her work is grounded in the belief that community struggle, collective knowledge, and movement-building are essential tools for social transformation.
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