Occupation: Professor
University: UC Davis
Organizations: USACBI, FJP-Davis, Radical Sanctuary-UC Davis
Sunaina Maira is Professor of Asian American Studies at UC Davis. She is the author of several books, including “Jil Oslo: Palestinian Hip Hop, Youth Culture, and the Youth Movement” and recently, “The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror.” Maira co-edited “The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent” which includes chapters highlighting the ways Palestine functions as a funnel for academic repression in the neoliberal university. Her latest book (from UC Press) is “Boycott! The Academy and Justice for Palestine” (https://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520294899), which documents the history of the academic boycott movement in the U.S. and the historical boycott campaign in the American Studies Association.
Maira is one of the founding organizers of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) as well as of Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UC Davis. After Trump’s election, she founded the Radical Sanctuary collective of faculty, students, and staff at UC Davis on an antiracist, antifascist, anti-imperialist, and anti-Zionist platform to connect struggles for immigrant, indigenous, worker, gender, and sexual rights. She has also been involved in antiwar, civil rights, and immigrant rights organizing in the Bay Area. Her message to those subjected to censorship, intimidation, threats, and defamation by the Zionist backlash industry is: these are the tactics of those who cannot resort to a political argument and are losing the moral argument! Stay strong. Together we can have one another’s backs and resist bullying, McCarthyism, and fascism!