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Members of the American Sociological Association (ASA) have passed a resolution calling “for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza” and supporting “members’ academic freedom, including but not limited to defending scholars’ right to speak out against Zionist occupation.” That makes it the latest scholarly group to call for an end to the fighting.
About a third of the ASA’s regular members took part in the online vote on the resolution and, of those, 59 percent voted yes, the association announced. Joya Misra, ASA’s president, said voting took place April 17 through Monday, and the results were released Thursday.
Misra didn’t have figures for how many people actually voted. The association has roughly 8,000 regular members, suggesting around 1,600 backed the resolution.
A group called Sociologists for Palestine, which pushed for the resolution, said in a news release that the vote “adds to the chorus of academics expressing democratic agency in a moment where freedom of speech is under attack.” The ASA Council, of which Misra is a member, previously rejected the group’s call to approve the resolution, saying ASA’s members have “a range of backgrounds” and “a variety of perspectives” that the association “strives to reflect.” The resolution then went before members for the vote, where it faced public criticism from some Jewish ASA members.
Eman Abdelhadi, a Palestinian-Egyptian sociologist, said in the Sociologists for Palestine news release that “Anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism has prevented institution after institution from recognizing Palestinian humanity, history and suffering. This resolution is a crucial first step towards righting this wrong.”
Misra told Inside Higher Ed that she supported the resolution proponents’ work. “They went through the democratic process to get the statement approved by the membership and they succeeded,” she said.
