July 2025 Statement

Email Subject Line: Boycott SCMS 2026

Dear Supporters of the Palestine Solidarity Working Group:

Israel’s deliberate effort to starve Gazans as part of its genocidal campaign in Palestine constitutes torture. The blockade of medical resources, humanitarian aid, and other essential needs has resulted in a slow, miserable death streamed before the world. Action is necessary in the face of this atrocity.  

We hereby call for a boycott of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2026 annual conference scheduled for March 26-29, 2026 in Chicago. We make this appeal to anyone whose sense of moral, ethical, and intellectual integrity condemns academic silence, repression, and complicity in the genocide – all of which the SCMS leadership is historically guilty. We condemn the Board’s silence and refusal to issue a public statement on the genocide, mediacide and scholasticide in Palestine and its lack of transparency with the membership. 

Because of the SCMS Board’s threats to deplatform us (and their implied threat of legal action), the PSWG has changed its working group name to avoid ambiguity. The group will now be called Scholars of Cinema and Media Studies in Solidarity with Palestine (SCMSSP). Our new Instagram handle is @cine.media.studies.4.palestine. 

For nearly two years, the SCMS Board of Directors has refused to publicly acknowledge Palestine or decry anti-Palestinian racism and the Israeli genocide of Palestine. Instead, the Board’s recent actions include: 1) ignoring the wishes of more than 700 SCMS members and supporters that it publish a statement condemning the scholasticide and mediacide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza; 2) issuing mass messages to, in effect, deny the perpetration of racism and threats against SCMS members at the 2025 conference; 3) disabling vital communication platforms for SCMS caucuses and SIGs, then making draconian changes to how those platforms operate; and 4) making undemocratic changes to the rules of nomination to the Board without explanation or rationale.

The SCMSSP’s commitment to Palestine and other countries in the SWANA region affected by the Zionist onslaught is central to our efforts. We also acknowledge the structural, systemic, and historical relationship of that onslaught to the epidemic of neocolonial violence and oppression around the world, especially that which affects racialized and minoritized peoples of the Global South. We are calling for a boycott of SCMS 2026 Chicago because we care for the safety and well-being of people everywhere, whether outside the U.S. or within its imperial core. In view of the U.S.-based ICE kidnappings of people without due process, targeting of international travelers, and surveillance of people doing work along race, class, gender, sexuality, and other minoritized backgrounds, it is no longer safe for prospective SCMS participants to come to the U.S. and risk being subjected to discrimination and violence. As a gesture of solidarity with them, our call for a boycott is also meant to help defend Palestinian scholars, precarious scholars, and scholars from other regions, whose work and/or nationalities might render them subject to surveillance and intimidation, against unwarranted repressive actions by U.S. agencies and authorities.

Whereas we are calling for a boycott of the SCMS 2026 annual conference, we ask SCMS members to exercise their judgment as it relates to the payment of membership fees.

The SCMSSP is working to organize a parallel scholarly forum. This forum is envisioned as a largely virtual conference that will, in addition to protesting the SCMS Board’s inaction regarding Palestine, allow scholars excluded from SCMS to become a more central and active part of the conversation. This forum aims to position justice at its intellectual core and within its organizing framework. The field of film and media studies shall no longer be deemed “apolitical”! Scholars working on all aspects of cinema and media studies are welcome. The SCMSSP thus hopes to offer a space for beginning to imagine and create film and media studies networks that honor and value social justice, responsible scholarship, and human life. Details are forthcoming. 

Please feel free to reach out to us with questions. We hope that you will join us in this eminently necessary cause. 

Thank you,

The SCMSSP (formerly the PSWG)

(Please follow our instagram account @cine.media.studies.4.palestine for more updates)

May 2025 Statement

Dear Supporters of the Palestine Solidarity Working Group,

We hope you are doing well as the academic year comes to a conclusion. 

As we bear witness via our screens to more than nineteen months of the genocide in Palestine, now being implemented in the form of deliberate mass starvation, and naked tactics of ethnic cleansing, we also ponder in dismay: What actions must we implement in order to hold accountable academic institutions that adopt neutrality and silence while Israel martyrs Palestinians and other peoples in the SWANA region?

The events that transpired at this year’s SCMS conference in Chicago are but a small example of who the doctrine of institutional neutrality really protects and serves. During the conference, a Zionist attendee disrupted several panels during the reading of the modified land acknowledgement which linked US settler colonialism to the US-Israeli occupation of Palestine and the Gaza genocide. The attendee, an Israeli participant at the conference, yelled at the presenters and attempted to video-record them against their consent. To our knowledge, he also disrupted a conference talk that mentioned Palestine. Upon learning about this agitator, the SCMS Board initially feigned concern for the panelists affected. But as most of you will recall, the Board’s official response to this incident was a censorious, obfuscating, and harmful email sent to membership, which announced a shutdown of member communications, baselessly blamed the PSWG for pretending official SCMS affiliation and abusing the internal messaging system with our suggested land acknowledgement, and vaguely mentioning a “serious disruption [intended to] intimidate and suppress speech” in its penultimate paragraph in such a way as to insinuate that the PSWG was behind it. Although the Board claimed that the person responsible for the disruption was expelled from the conference, we know that he was allowed to present on his panel and attend and disrupt panels on the following day. 

When we reached out to the Board after the conference asking for  clarification of their misleading communication, the Board refused because they were busy “address[ing] other issues currently facing the organization.” They also issued us a cease and desist on using the title SCMS in our Instagram handle and our email accounts, threatening to deplatform us with a trademark violation takedown request. These are blatant attempts at silencing which fall under the guise of neutrality. They also reveal what happens when the Society’s leadership undemocratically treats our organization as a corporate brand to be protected, rather than what it is: an intellectual society to which we all belong. 

In our previous communication with you, we shared a form to collect testimonies and narratives about anti-Palestinian, anti-Palestine discrimination you may have experienced or witnessed at the conference, or that involve SCMS. Your responses point us towards next steps. 

In the spirit of collectivity and solidarity, we are reaching out with a brief request. We would appreciate it if you would kindly complete a brief survey regarding  next steps. Our goal is to achieve a 90% response rate by Monday, June 16. Please feel free to share the following link with other interested members of SCMS:

The PSWG will continue to center Palestine and Palestinians on our ethical, moral, and intellectual compass. We plan to nominate a candidate in September 2025 to run for a position on the SCMS Board of Directors. We will reach out to you for support with this campaign over the coming months. Our rationale for this action is the SCMS Board’s ongoing stifling of academic freedom and speech; lack of transparency; policing and surveillance of activism; and placement of scholars in vulnerable positions – all as evidenced by its most recent letter to the PSWG in which it reiterates its refusal to explain its quietism regarding Palestine to the membership-at-large and demands that the PSWG remove all reference to SCMS from our communications and social media handles. We say of this neglect, no more! 

The PSWG will meet periodically throughout the summer to forge a path forward. Our commitment to a free Palestine includes addressing the concerns of the SCMS membership, especially those members who suffer social and professional consequences due to their activism, immigration status, economic precarity, and more. 

Because of  the SCMS Board’s threats to deplatform us (and their implied threat of legal action), we will change  our working group name to avoid all ambiguity. The group will now be called Scholars of Cinema and Media Studies in Solidarity with Palestine (SCMSSP). Our new instagram handle is @cine.media.studies.4.palestine. We take this measure not because we believe that our use of “SCMS” has ever implied that we represent the organization officially but because we believe this accusation is a distraction from the real issue at hand: voicing support for stopping Israel’s genocide in Gaza; expressing an increasingly collective desire to end its occupation of Palestine; and acknowledging patterns of settler colonialism that link global cultures and film histories, which include Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine. 

Please feel free to reach out to us at cine-media-studies-solidarity-palestine@riseup.net if you have questions, comments, or suggestions. We wish you a restful summer break. 

Thank you in advance – and free Palestine!

In solidarity,

Scholars of Cinema and Media Studies in Solidarity with Palestine

(formerly the The Palestine Solidarity Working Group of the SCMS Global Solidarity initiative)