The Black-Palestinian Solidarity Conference Melbourne 2019 will be a powerful convergence of ideas, art and transnational solidarity.
About this Event
It is our pleasure to bring you the second historic Black-Palestinian Solidarity conference this coming November in Melbourne.
This iteration of the conference looks at the long-standing solidarity between Aboriginal and Palestinian peoples in the continent now known as Australia and across the globe in the struggle against settler colonial occupation.
The conference will reflect on the role and forms of solidarity in precarious times of modern nation statehood, questioning how, with the hardening of immigration policies, the closing of borders, the rise of right-wing discourses, and historical institutional racism, members of the international community can work towards self-determination and sovereignty, separate from national and state governments.
How can social, academic, activist and artistic communities join together and renew longstanding relationships founded on the desire for liberation, freedom and self-determination? This conference is interested in experimenting with Black-Palestinian solidarity as theoretical framework and practice for a basis of transnational movements of resistance.
The Black-Palestinian Solidarity conference will include panels and presentations from leading Aboriginal, Palestinian Australian and international thinkers, academics, artists and more.
Key details
Brown Room, University of Melbourne
Building 193, Wilson Avenue
Parkville, VIC 3010
Directions: https://maps.unimelb.edu.au/parkville/building/193/106
Keynote addresses
Professor Gary Foley
Gary Foley was born in Grafton (1950), northern NSW of Gumbainggir descent. Expelled from school aged 15, Foley came to Sydney as an apprentice draughtsperson. Since then he has been at the centre of major political activities including the: Springbok tour demonstrations (1971); Tent Embassy in Canberra (1972); Commonwealth Games protest (1982); protests during the bicentennial celebrations (1988). Foley was involved in the establishment of the first Aboriginal self-help and survival organisations including: Redfern’s Aboriginal Legal Service; Aboriginal Health Service in Melbourne; National Black Theatre. In 1974 he was part of an Aboriginal delegation that toured China and in 1978 he took films on black Australia to the Cannes Film festival. Foley has been: a director of the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service (1981), Aboriginal Arts Board (1983-86) and Aboriginal Medical Service Redfern (1988); senior lecturer at Swinburne College; consultant to the Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody (1988); board member of the Aboriginal Legal Service; and on the national executive of the National Coalition of Aboriginal Organisations. In 1994 Foley created the first Aboriginal owned and operated website when he created the Koori History website, which remains one of the most comprehensive Aboriginal education resources available today online.
Professor Rabab Abdulhadi
Born and raised in Nablus, Palestine, Rabab Abdulhadi is a long-time feminist activist and scholar who has made significant contributions to the struggle for Palestinian self-determination and the well-being of Palestinian women. She has participated in numerous organisations dedicated to fighting for the rights of Arab and Arab-American women. From 1982 to 1988, she was the Director of Political and International Relations at the Middle East Research Center in New York. Rabab Abdulhadi was instrumental in founding the Union of Palestinian Women’s Associations in North America during the first Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, that grew into 2,000 members and 29 chapters in the United States and Canada. Rabab Abdulhadi is also involved in a variety of coalition-building projects that make links between diasporic communities living in the U.S., U.S. communities of color and women of color activisms. Doctor Rabab Abdulhadi has published extensively for the academic and mainstream presses writing on issues of nationalism, terrorism, race, ethnicity and the experiences of the diasporic Arab communities. She is currently conducting research for the Gender and Sexuality Studies Center, in the Global South Project
The Karrabing Film Collective
Karrabing Film Collective are an Indigenous media group based in Australia’s Northern Territories that uses filmmaking and installation as a form of grassroots resistance and self-organization. The collective includes approximately 30 members—predominantly living in the Belyuen community—who together create films using an “improvisational realism” that opens a space beyond binaries of the fictional and the documentary, the past and the present. Meaning “low tide” in the Emmiyengal language, karrabing refers to a form of collectivity outside of government-imposed strictures of clanship or land ownership. Shot on handheld cameras and phones, most of Karrabing’s films dramatize and satirize the daily scenarios and obstacles that collective members face in their various interactions with corporate and state entities. Composing webs of nonlinear narratives that touch on cultural memory, place, and ancestry by freely jumping in time and place, Karrabing exposes and intervenes into the longstanding facets of colonial violence that impact members directly, such as environmental devastation, land restrictions, and economic exploitation. The Karrabing Film Collective has presented its work at IMA Brisbane; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Institut fur Auslandsbeziehungen, Berlin; Jakarta Biennale; Centre Pompidou, Paris; e-flux, New York; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Tate Modern, London; Documenta 14, Kassel; the Melbourne International Film Festival; Berlinale, Forum Expanded; and Biennale of Sydney; among others.
Register now to secure tickets, receive the full event program and hear about our community satellite events leading up to and around the conference!
Complimentary passes are available upon request. Please email blackpalestiniansolidarity19@gmail.com if you would like one.
Everyone is welcome to attend this event, however racism, homophobia, transphobia, biphobia, sexism, ableism will not be tolerated under any circumstances. Anyone engaging in such behaviour will be asked to leave. Content note: This event will likely contain discussion of racism, sexual and colonial violence.
Accessibility
Brown Room at the University of Melbourne, where the main conference will take place, is wheelchair accessible.
Bathrooms at Brown Room include an All Gender Wheelchair Accessible Toilet RH and a Female and Male Ambulant Toilet.
Stop 1 Melbourne University/Swanston St is a low floor tram stop. The stop services routes 1, 3, 5, 6, 16, 64, 67 and 72.
Disability parking: https://maps.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/30498/parking-spaces-map.pdf
Additional accessibility options to be confirmed.
Sponsors:
School of Culture and Communications (University of Melbourne)
Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration
Centre of Visual Arts
Australia Palestine Advocacy Network
Arab Council for the Social Sciences
Maritime Union of Australia
Victoria University
Center of Palestine Studies (Columbia University)
Partners:
Institute for Postcolonial Studies
Averroes Centre of Arab Culture
Palestinian Film Festival
Australian Jewish Democratic Society
Readings
This conference is held and was mostly organized in and around the lands of the Wurundjeri people in the Eastern Kulin Nation. Sovereignty was never ceded. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri, and First Nation peoples everywhere, in their ongoing struggle against occupation. We pay respect to Indigenous Elders past and present everywhere.
