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FAQs - Boycott of SCMS 2026
1. Who are we?
Scholars of Cinema and Media Studies in Solidarity with Palestine (SCMSSP) is a group of members of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) that formed in November 2023 as the Palestine Solidarity Working Group (PSWG) of the SCMS Global Solidarity Series initiative. Our members include junior and senior international scholars and artists, some of whom have worked for years on Palestine solidarity within and outside of SCMS. In early summer 2024 we contacted all SCMS members, inviting them to add their names to a resolution condemning the Israeli genocide in Gaza. About 620 SCMS members – almost a quarter of the SCMS membership – and nearly 100 affiliated people signed the resolution. After the 2025 conference, the SCMS Board demanded that the PSWG eliminate all references to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies from our group name; hence, we adopted the new name.
2. Why are we boycotting SCMS 2026?
SCMSSP is calling for a boycott of SCMS 2026 in order to send a message to the leadership of SCMS that we will no longer tolerate their dismissal of our requests, since late 2023, that SCMS join the call for an Israeli ceasefire in Gaza, facilitate a membership vote on a BDS/PACBI resolution, formally reject the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and issue a statement of support for Palestinian and pro-Palestinian scholars and students contiguous with other documented statements the SCMS leadership has already issued condemning global and domestic injustices. In fact, every action the SCMS Board of Directors has taken since SCMSSP issued its first such call has sidelined and disciplined member efforts to provide platforms for debate and deliberation on these issues. We have identified some of their actions in our Call to Boycott.
In its recent communication to the SCMS membership (significantly, the first of their communications to explicitly name Palestine), the Board describes its silence on Palestine as a policy of “restraint” and asserts paternalistically that such restraint is necessary to defend the SCMS mission. We, as SCMS members, did not, however, recommend or select a policy of restraint: the Board enacted it unilaterally without consultation or meaningful discussion with the membership.
The message of the SCMS 2026 boycott is to show that, absent other democratic avenues, we can still vote with “our feet” and, in so doing, create vibrant and more inclusive scholarly film and media studies communities outside of the association’s structure as it currently stands. What is happening now in Gaza, the West Bank, and nearby Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and other countries in the region, amounts to what Mazin Qumsiyeh, among others, has referred to as the defining holocaust of the 21st century. It should not be a stretch for a scholarly film and media studies association to permit formal acknowledgement of this fact and its dire significance for all of us everywhere.
3. Won’t the boycott divide the membership?
What the Board does not realize is that “restraint” and “neutrality” in the face of a holocaust are not only immoral but also, in their own words, “divisive.” It is their decision to withhold positive action, and instead to obey preemptively in anticipation of prohibition and restriction, which alienates and excludes the membership. We need numbers – pledges to the boycott – in order to convey this message as effectively as possible. Through the boycott and an alternative conference, we can also build together: we can collectively imagine, discuss, and organize around a different vision of what we as cinema and media scholars might become.
4. What are we hoping to accomplish with the boycott?
We foresee changes within the structure and protocols of SCMS and its leadership that would entail realizing the Board’s stated intentions to democratically represent the association’s constituency. Such changes would first and foremost mean openly encouraging public discussion and peaceful actions of solidarity by film and media studies communities with and regarding the peoples most affected by the ongoing genocide in Gaza: Palestinians. The SCMS leadership must in turn stop hiding behind a pretense of fear that the association’s 501c3 status might be placed into jeopardy by making such changes; that is a fiction, as the advocacy, statements, and endorsements of the academic boycott of Israel, by numerous other academic associations with 501c3 status, such as AAA, ASA, MESA, MLA, NWSA, AAAS, and ASAP, demonstrate.
5. What is the SCMSSP alternative conference?
The SCMSSP alternative conference is planned as a virtual forum that centers social justice as an organizing principle. It is conceived as a space that accommodates scholars under threat on account of their identity, citizenship, and/or scholarship. The SCMSSP alternative conference will be a welcoming and invigorating space of critical engagement for all film and media scholars who support Palestine and the boycott of SCMS 2026. This alternative conference will make space for building relationships and encouraging intellectual exchange rooted in social justice for Palestine and beyond. The SCMSSP alternative conference is but one such forum; we encourage folx to participate in all such spaces. SCMSSP supports fora, colloquia, conferences, symposia, and the like that uphold responsible knowledge production in conversation with scholars from the Global South, historically excluded communities, and those facing situations of precarious employment and financial limitation – and will do so as well at the alternative conference. In effect, with the SCMSSP alternative forum we are removing the spatial and financial obstacles to dialoguing in scholarly fashion, with care, rigor, and responsibility.
6. Why doesn’t the SCMSSP work with the Board to create change from within?
First and foremost, we reject the implied premise that institutions of power must be protected at the expense of historically excluded people, Palestinians included. By sanctioning anticipatory obedience, upholding power differentials, and compromising social justice principles, SCMS as it currently stands is a counterproductive institution. In good faith, and resolute in our commitment to justice in Palestine, we refuse to accept crumbs of compassion or feigned collegiality when it comes to centering Palestine. Our support for Palestinian self-determination and other related causes is non-negotiable. Over the past two years, the Board has not been receptive to the calls we made as the PSWG that it similarly commit. The tone and language of the message circulated by the Board to the SCMS membership during SCMS 2025 in fact demonstrates contempt for the PSWG and, by extension, its supporters. The SCMSSP is not foreclosing communication with the Board; however, we believe it necessary to form a more functional learned society, one that acknowledges, names, and addresses the genocide, scholasticide, and mediacide in Palestine. A more positive, reasoned and committed statement from the Board is the first step toward repairing the harm it has done through silent complicity.
7. Shouldn’t we be electing pro-Palestine people to the Board instead of boycotting the conference?
The SCMSSP is concerned that the self-nomination process does not clearly outline the full criteria the Nominating Committee will follow when evaluating nominations. As the SCMS website notes, the Nominating Committee provides a list of candidates to the Board, and the Board approves the list. Does this mean that the Board will consider candidates who disagree with its position on any number of issues, including Palestine? Moreover, representation on the current Board does not translate to reparative justice. The SCMSSP is fully committed to Palestine, and believes we must prioritize addressing the structural problems and culture of silence on this and related issues within SCMS. To this end, we plan to support a candidate who centers Palestine.
8. SCMS board says that as a 501(c)3 organization, SCMS cannot take a political stand, or weather the risk of lawsuits. What is the SCMSSP’s position on this?
There is no legal obstacle preventing a 501(c)3 non-profit from issuing a statement that contains political content as long as the statement does not imply or call for moral or financial support for a political candidate. Over the years we have spoken about this matter to SCMS members and officers, based on research undertaken in university law libraries, but they have typically ignored our legitimate, defensible findings. Our research in fact explains why MESA, AHA, and numerous other academic associations, including SCMS, have always been able, without facing legal repercussions, to issue statements containing political content. The fact of the matter at hand is that when the political content involves Palestine, SCMS balks. Period. That's the discriminatory crux of the issue, which we are now challenging and that extends, intersectionally, to a wide range of member safety issues (genuine physical safety, not the legally flimsy claims to "hurt feelings" by Jewish Zionists) and concomitant issues concerning the discursive, epistemological, ideological, and structural limitations emplaced by SCMS, as a 20th-century American institution, around our (inter)disciplinary praxis, whether at conferences or in our lives as scholars within and outside the academy.
9. By insisting upon the need for a boycott, are we being insensitive to concerns pertaining to the upheavals brought about by the Trump administration’s domestic and global policies and actions?
SCMSSP believes that scholarly associations like SCMS must speak out, from within their respective (inter)disciplinary discursive parameters, against balking in the face of the fear and intimidation wrought by oppressive and draconian measures such as state terror and genocide, ICE raids, arrests and deportations, and the imposition of martial law in American cities. As Palestinian media workers continue to be systematically targeted and assassinated for bearing witness to the atrocities in Gaza, the lessons of history, especially as Americans have been taught to understand and frame it, for better or worse, as Qumsiyeh and other Palestinians have averred, are clear: those of us who live and teach in the United States – the country which leads the world in financing, encouraging, rationalizing and fostering the implementation of the genocide in Gaza (and beyond) – must do everything we can to stop it.
10. How do I get more involved?
If you would like to be involved in SCMSSP, email us at: cine-media-studies-palestine@riseup.net. Please have conversations with colleagues and circulate this FAQ document on your networks.
11. I submitted a proposal for SCMS 2026 and I just found out about the boycott. What can I do?
It is never too late to join the boycott! We encourage you to reconsider your participation in SCMS 2026 and sign the pledge to boycott at:
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