UBC is currently invested in at least 30 corporations that fuel genocide, occupation, and systemic human rights violations. These include 17 weapons and military technology companies and 13 corporations listed in the UN Database of Enterprises Involved in Illegal Israeli Settlements.
What’s at Stake?
- In Palestine and Lebanon: Over 44,000 Palestinians and 3,500 Lebanese civilians have been killed since October 2023 by the Israeli Occupation Forces. Thousands face
- starvation and disease due to blockades and relentless attacks.
- Beyond the region: The same corporations profit from wars worldwide, the militarization of borders, forced family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border, and countless other atrocities.
As students, faculty, and community members, we have the power to demand change. By signing the petition, you are urging UBC to take responsibility for its investments.
We demand that UBC:
- Commits to divesting from these companies
- Establishes ethical investment policies that uphold justice and human rights
Visit UBCDivest.org to learn more, read the petition, and sign as a student, alumni, faculty, staff, donor, family member who supported a student, or other community member with financial ties to the university.
Sign the petition now and add your voice to the growing call for divestment!
We also encourage you to share this petition with your networks. Together, we can hold UBC accountable and push for a future free from investments in war and occupation.
Thank you for your support,
UBCDivest
Author Archives: E Wayne Ross
Stephen C. Fleury 1953-2025
NCSS Washington DC (Rouge Forum) 2006
I found out this past Saturday that my long time friend and colleague Steve Fleury passed away last night in New York.
Steve was a first rate intellectual, a farmer, talented musician, a community and educational activist, storyteller and a droll comic. He studied with Jack Mallan (author of No G.O.D.s in the Classroom) at Syracuse University and was an education professor at SUNY Oswego and Le Moyne College in Syracuse where he was also a long serving department head.
I met Steve soon after I arrived in New York in 1986. I was the newbie at meetings of group of studies education profs called the NYS Social Studies Education Consortium, the group met monthly at Syracuse University, Steve’s old stomping grounds.
We hit it off and by 1989 we had guest edited a journal issue critiquing the influence of the cultural right on social studies education. By 1990, Steve and I were co-editors of Social Science Record journal and working lots of conference papers and getting to be not just colleagues but good friends.
I clocked quite a few miles on the NYS Thurway to meet up in Syracuse or his place north of the city. Sometimes we met at a little diner half-way between Albany and Syracuse to work on journal submissions. We would have breakfast, drink gallons of coffee, have serious conversations about education issues, politics, social theory, as well as music, telling stories, laughing and generally having a great time.
Steve was one of the smartest, most well-read humans I have ever known. He was a “social studies guy” but he was also scholar of philosophy, cognitive psychology and the sciences (Steve wrote a tremendous chapter for The Social Studies Curriculum book on reclaiming science for social knowledge).
He also really liked to read Lewis Lapham’s work and I too was a great admirer of him, thus we had many conversations about Lapham and the work he published in Harper’s Magazine.
Steve was a key player in the foundation of The Rouge Forum and was there in Detroit when the RF emerged from a group of social studies, literacy, and inclusive education folks and he supported the RF in very many ways, giving papers, writing articles, organizing RF meetings. We was also very involved in the political battles inside College and University Faculty Assembly – CUFA/NCSS in the 1990s-2000s.
Steve always presented as farmer first, not professor. He was always fun to be with, a self-deprecating humorist. Steve was always interested in exploring ideas. He was a great thinker, writer, and teacher. No matter the topic I always came away from our conversations with new understandings of things. We agreed on most things, but at times Steve also offered subtle, understated critiques of my perspectives or positions that pulled the rug out from under me (in a good way), opening my eyes to things had not seen before … he was engaged in pedagogical work all the time (and always loving it).
Steve was a great friend to me. He was my best man when Sandra and I got married. A few months after Colin died in 2017, he and his wife Liz came to be with us in Vancouver. Their loving and caring for us was a very important moment at a difficult and tragic time.
In the summer of 2023 we had a great holiday with Steve and Liz in Quebec City, where with their many personal connections to Quebec they gave us “the grand tour.”
Love you buddy. Thanks for everything. See you on the other side.
Tell the UBC Administration to Keep the Israeli Occupation Forces Off UBC Campus!
Review of The Social Studies Curriculum (5th Ed.) by Peter M. Nelson
I am happy to share a review of The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities (5th Ed.) by Peter M. Nelson (UBC) that was published in Theory and Research in Social Education on January 31, 2025.
While the focus of the review is on the fifth edition, Nelson puts the latest edition of the book in conversation with previous editions that were published in 1997, 2001, 2006 and 2014.
Taking stock of the field: Complicated conversations in social studies curriculum
Book Review by Peter M. Nelson
The social studies curriculum: Purposes, problems, and possibilities (5th edition), by Ross, E. W. (Ed.) Statue University of New York Press, 2024, 430 pp., $99.00 (hardcover), $36.95 (paperback). ISBN (hardcover) 9781438499024, ISBN (paperback) 9781438499031
With the fifth edition of The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities (TSSC), editor E. Wayne Ross and the book’s contributors deliver a vital, timely addition to the influential TSSC series. Across 17 chapters—14 of which are new to this edition—the boundaries of the social studies curriculum are relentlessly complicated and contested, and the book’s authors offer critical, compelling visions for how social studies teaching and learning can attend to a range of contemporary issues and topics.
Contextualizing the book
The fifth edition of TSSC arrives at a time when efforts to “capture,” or tame, social studies curriculum are ubiquitous and well-funded. To put it another way, if TSSC offers visions of the social studies curriculum as inherently wild terrain—even feral in its disorderly commitments to real-world action, to understanding that “social studies curriculum and teaching is by its very nature a political undertaking” (p. 381), to its critical attention to the complicated contexts in which education actually occurs—then the capture of social studies begins with its reduction. Phenomena like uncertainty, ambivalence, unpredictability, and spontaneity, while embedded in human experience (and presumably entangled with the project of education as well), are viewed by policy makers, administrators, ideologues, and politicians as problems to eradicate, let alone the more explicit socio-political potentialities that are part and parcel of any meaningful social studies education. To be sure, attempts to capture social studies curriculum, or to reduce its radical potential to foment sociopolitical change, are not new; what Evans (2004) called the social studies wars have been waged since the advent of the field in the early twentieth century. My point, here, is that the fifth edition of TSSC provides an updated glimpse of current contestations around numerous issues, and one of the book’s most valuable, and unique, contributions is how Ross and other chapter authors manage to frame a wide range of sociopolitical issues as readily available for social studies teachers and students to explore and attend to in meaningful ways. …
To continue reading the review see the link below or download the review here.
Peter M. Nelson (31 Jan 2025): Taking stock of the field: Complicated conversations in social studies curriculum, Theory & Research in Social Education, https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2025.2459031
Critical Education 16(1), Feb 2025: With special section on Neoliberal Capitalism and Public Education
New issue of Critical Education published today. Critical Education, 16(1), includes a special section on “Neoliberal Capitalism and Public Education” edited by Lana Parker (U of WIndsor).
Contesting Concepts, Imagining New Possibilities: David Graeber, Democracy, and Social Studies Curriculum
Peter M Nelson
Applying Critical Race Theory to Enhance the Racial Inclusivity of Teachers in Canada: A Review of the Literature and Facilitative Programming
Lucas Skelton
Critical Making Workshops: Sparking Meta-Discussions for Critical Thinking in Vocational Education
Regina Sipos, Alexander Kutschera, Janina Klose
Neoliberal Capitalism and Public Education (Lana Parker, Section Editor)
A Window into Public Education: Documenting Neoliberal Capitalism’s Harms, Advocating for Alternatives
Lana Parker
Critical Geography and Teaching Against Neoliberal Racial Capitalism in New York City Elementary Schools
Debbie Sonu, Karen Zaino, Robert J. Helfenbein
Debbie Sonu, Karen Zaino, Robert J. Helfenbein
The Allure of Professionalism: Teacher Candidate Subjectivity and Resistance in Neoliberal Times
Adam Kaszuba
Adam Kaszuba
University Bureaucracies as the Death of Play: The 1968 Strax Affair and the Arts of Discombobulation
Harrison Dressler, Noah Pleshet; Daniel Tubb
Harrison Dressler, Noah Pleshet; Daniel Tubb
“I Need This Person’s Support to Have a Career”: The Material and Emotional Impacts of Neoliberalism on Trans Collegians’ Classroom Experiences at a Public University
Justin Gutzwa, Robert Marx
Justin Gutzwa, Robert Marx
Towards an Ideal Model of Education for Critical Citizenship
Thanks to Noelia Pérez‐Rodríguez for the opportunity to work with her and colleagues Elisa Navarro‐Medina and Nicolás De‐Alba‐Fernández – all in the Department of Didactics of Experimental and Social Sciences at University of Seville – on an article analyzing social science curriculum in Spain and working towards an ideal model of critical citizenship.
Abstract:
In this study, we analysed the presence of citizenship education in the new Spanish social sciences curriculum, focusing on both the primary and secondary education stages. The relevance of the study stems from the need to adapt to a new reality, in which it is crucial to develop in children and young people the skills to understand, interpret and make critical decisions. Considering the model outlined as ideal, and being aware of the difficulty involved in achieving it, we took as a reference a possible model to analyse the Spanish curriculum, the ICCS study framework. The research presented is based on a review of policy documents and analyses the curricula of compulsory education stages through a content analysis technique. The results show that in the Spanish curriculum, under the logic of the ICCS framework, cognitive skills and citizen content are more prevalent than those based on attitudes and engagement. This issue prompts us to reflect on the future changes that should be made to approach the model we consider relevant.
Citation:
Navarro Medina, E , Ross, E. W., Pérez-Rodríguez, N., & De Alba Fernandez, N. (2025). Towards an ideal model of education for critical citizenship. An analysis of the Spanish curricular change in social sciences. European Journal of Education, 60(1), e70010. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.70010
We are currently working on making the article open access. If you’re interested in and don’t have access to the article please contact me, I’m happy to share.
NFJP Statement for the New Academic Semester
NFJP Statement for the New Academic Semester
January 20, 2025
As we enter 2025, we are full of grief and rage at the US-funded ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. After more than 470 days of harrowing brutality that has targeted hospitals, schools, universities, and tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of Palestinians, the incoming Trump administration secured a ceasefire from the intransigent Netanyahu administration. Credible reports indicate that this ceasefire, which began on Sunday January 19, is contingent on a set of promises to the Israeli prime minister that include, above all, the annexation of the West Bank. The scope and breadth of the dispossession to come may well surpass these expectations.
Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapters across North America will face many challenges in the days, weeks, and months to come. As we fight to keep our voices strong, and in solidarity with those of our student allies, we must follow the lead of Palestinian scholars in the Gaza Strip who have called on us to support their efforts to rebuild in the wake of scholasticide, a term Karma Nabulsi coined in 2009 to name Israel’s systematic destruction of Palestinian education.
Since October 2023, armed and abetted by the United States, Israeli forces have destroyed eighty percent of the schools and every single university in the Gaza Strip. These include: the Islamic University of Gaza, the University College of Applied Sciences, Al-Azhar University, Al-Aqsa University, Palestine Technical College, Al-Quds Open University, Gaza University and Al-Israa University. Since October 2023, armed and abetted by the United States, Israeli forces have also destroyed nearly every library, archive, and cultural center in the Gaza Strip. The Gaza Municipal Library, the Islamic Manuscript Library, and all municipal archives have been reduced to rubble: centuries of endowments, collections and documents are all gone.
As we wage our struggles in the ever-shrinking space available for speaking the truth about Palestine in the United States, here are some tools to center Palestine and Palestinian voices:
- Scholars Against the War in Palestine toolkit: https://scholarsagainstwar.org/toolkit/
- Librarians and Archivists with Palestine: https://librarianswithpalestine.org/gaza-report-2024/; especially their One Book, Many Communities events: https://librarianswithpalestine.org/campaigns-2/onebookcampaign/;
- Institute for Palestine Studies articles and reports such as this one by Abdel Latif Zaki Abu Hashem: https://www.palestine-studies.org/ar/node/1655344;
- the Right to Education Campaign at Birzeit University: https://right2edu.birzeit.edu/
FJP chapters across the United States now confront the torrent of repression and punishment of academic speech that the Trump administration has promised, likely intensifying the repression of the Biden administration. As we move into 2025, National FJP will work in coalition with other organizations committed to defending academic speech, including the Middle East Studies Association of North America, Palestine Legal, the Coalition to End Zionist Repression, AAUP and AAUP/AFT 6741, and the Center for Academic Freedom, among others. We know that standing up against scholasticide in Palestine is also an act of standing up for our own universities, where corporatization, securitization, and austerity politics are rapidly eroding higher education, academic freedom, and other basic rights. We know that taking ethical positions against genocide, no matter what our opponents call us, is the only way forward. We applaud the brave people who have made these positions possible through the work of local FJP chapters and at various academic associations and institutions.
And we listen to Palestinian scholars in the Gaza Strip who remind us: “We built these universities from tents. And from tents, with the support of our friends, we will rebuild them once again.”
Steering Committee, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, National Network
Conference Call for Papers – Starting Over: Mass Politics and the Future of the Left
Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research and the University of Naples Federico II invite individual paper and panel submissions for our 48th annual conference and special issue Call For Papers. Topics may include but are not limited to: Inequality and (De)Democratization; Left Economic Policy and Labour Market Restructuring; War, Imperialism and Colonialism; Race, Gender and Other Disparities; Austerity and the State; Climate Change; Digital Labour and Platforms; Unions and Social Movements; Populism and Political Realignment; Global Governance.
The deadline for conference submissions has been extended to: January 1, 2025. Please see the attached CFP or below for more information. We would appreciate if you could share with any departmental colleagues and networks you believe may be interested.
Starting Over: Mass Politics and the Future of the Left Conference and Special Issue Call For Papers
Organizing Committee: Carlo Fanelli, York University; Francesca Gabbriellini, University of Bologna; Luca Mandara, University of Naples Federico II; Marco Marrone, University of Salento; Salvatore Prinzi, University of Naples Federico II; Heather Whiteside, University of Waterloo
When: May 27-30, 2025
Where: University of Naples Federico II
From the economic downturn of the early-2000s, to the Great Recession and COVID-19 crisis, the last twenty-five years have been characterized by mounting economic volatility and accompanying political unrest. While precipitating this period, the broadly defined “left” has increasingly shown itself to be a spent force – either unable to convince the masses that real alternatives to market rule do exist, or abject failures in their ready willingness to reproduce the status quo.
The decline of organized labour as a social and political force, combined with social movements’ recurring inability to scale-up demands, has exacerbated the decoupling of class from political identity. In its place, the radical right has thrived as evinced by the mainstreaming of neofascist politics, rise of authoritarian populisms and accompanying assault on democratic rights and freedoms. Despite a working class larger and more heterogeneous than ever, a yawning chasm now separates the left from working class politics. In this void have flourished deepening forms of anti-politics, from political disengagement to acquiescence of authoritarian rule. How has the working class and left been transformed? What accounts for the growing divide? What is the next new left project? And how can left movements challenge wider forms of depoliticization?
To submit your proposal, please click HERE or visit www.alternateroutes.ca.
UBC Faculty for Palestine: Statement of Support for Professor Litsa Chatzivasileiou
Statement of Support for Professor Litsa Chatzivasileiou
UBC Faculty for Palestine
November 25 2024
We write as members of University of British Columbia’s Faculty for Palestine, a solidarity network of over 100 members. We express our strong support for Professor Litsa Chatzivasileiou, who has been the target of unauthorized classroom surveillance and a smear campaign for her teaching on Palestine. On September 18, Professor Chatzivasileiou gave a lecture in her course titled “Global Issues and Social Justice” drawing on a series of scholarly sources, including the internationally recognized work of Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and legal scholar Khaled Beydoun. During this lecture, Professor Chatzivasileiou was audio-recorded by an unknown person in violation of university policy.
A 12-minute recording of her lecture was shared with a journalist and subsequently two factually incorrect and inflammatory articles were released by CTV News Vancouver on November 20th and 21st. The headlines falsely claim that UBC is investigating her, a clear case of misreporting as there is no investigation happening or pending. Not only is she not being investigated, but in fact Campus Security at UBC is investigating numerous threats against Dr. Chatzivasileiou and her family that have resulted from this smear campaign. The article grossly misrepresented Professor Chatzivasileiou’s rigorously researched lecture, misquoting her in the written article and randomly deploying Youtube footage from a 2012 lecture for the video newsclip version. What CTV News describes as a “rant” was a careful elaboration of the critical thinking of important legal and feminist scholarship on the impact of the genocide on Gaza. It was delivered by an instructor with more than 20 years’ experience teaching at UBC who is beloved by her students as well as her colleagues and staff. The CTV segment falsely implied that Professor Chatzivasileiou’s words and actions were antisemitic – an assertion that we categorically reject.
This is not simply a case of poor journalistic standards as articles in this vein have real consequences. Since the publication of the article, Dr. Chatzivasileiou has received numerous threats of physical and sexual violence against her and her family. Such threats are meant to create a chilling effect in university classrooms, erecting obstacles to teaching and discussing the most pressing issues of our times. These intimidations constitute alarming threats to the academic freedoms of faculty and students and therefore fundamentally endanger the mission of the university.
Furthermore, according to UBC’s Principles for Recording Classroom Activities dated September 2021 students must seek recording permission from faculty and other students in the course directly “either from the instructor or through the academic accommodation process.” No such permission or accommodation was sought in Dr. Chatzivasileiou’s class. Even when the proper permissions are sought “such recordings are made for personal academic use, and are not for distribution (within or beyond the course)” according to UBC’s policies. The unauthorized taping of Dr. Chatzivasileiou’s class therefore violated not only university policy protecting faculty but also the rights of her students. There has been no prior or subsequent student complaint or grievance filed about the class, further suggesting that Dr. Chatzivasileiou was deliberately targeted for harassment. Absent a filed university complaint, the delay between the recording (September 18) and the release of the articles (November 20 and 21) suggests the goal was not to address a classroom situation but to publicly discredit and cause harm to Dr. Chatzivasileiou.
Misinformation and information warfare have served to dehumanize the Palestinian people and legitmize the Israeli state’s current campaign of genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. As faculty in support of Palestinian liberation, we firmly believe that rigorous education based on scholarship and faculty’s expertise–like the teaching of Dr. Chatzivasileiou– is more critical than ever. Surveillance, threats, and intimidation campaigns aim to silence faculty and students, and inhibit their rights to academic freedom, education, and freedom of expression. These smear campaigns are dangerous affronts to the university and all its community members.
We call for UBC to immediately 1) reiterate and uphold the university policy banning the unauthorized recording and sharing of lectures and classroom discussions; 2) reaffirm faculty and students’ rights to academic freedom with regards to education on Palestine, Palestinian liberation, and the Israeli state’s apartheid policies, military occupation, and genocide; 3) confirm, contrary to CTV’s claims, that no investigation of Dr. Chatzivasileiou has occurred; and 4) provide material support for faculty like Dr. Chatzivasileiou who are targeted and defamed through surveillance and smear campaigns.
Endorsed by:
Graduate Students for Palestine–UBC
Independent Jewish Voices–UBC
Jewish Faculty Network–UBC
UBC Social Justice Centre
UBC Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights
UBC Staff for Palestine
In conversation: Professor E Wayne Ross and Professor Alpesh Maisuria
I was delighted to conduct a seminar and reading group exploring critical social education in September 2024 at with the Education and and Childhood Research Group at University of the West of England. ECRG is lead by Professor Alpesh Maisuria and here is a short “in conversation” between Professor Maisuria and me.
