How pro-Palestine speech is discursively disciplined in UK universities: a typology of power-structural contexts de/agentializing voices

In university contexts, the Palestine Exception denotes processes exempting Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid regime from norms of academic freedom and critical scrutiny. The exemption helps protect UK universities’ complicity with the Israeli settler-colonial apartheid regime. When Palestine is silenced through UK university processes, they internalise needs of the macro-institutional social order. To investigate the silencing process, our Palestine Solidarity Group surveyed university experiences through questions soliciting anonymous answers. We analysed the experiences by combining concepts from the Palestine Exception and Critical Discourse Analysis literatures. The survey responses reveal various university processes constraining pro-Palestine materials, events, discussions and conversations; together those constraints result in the general silence on Palestine. Drawn from those experiences, our novel typology identifies how specific power-structural contexts discursively discipline pro-Palestine speech and activities. Some discourses de-agentialize pro-Palestine staff by weakening their agency or obscuring the agent of constraints. In horizontal micro-interactions, colleagues deterred our respondents’ pro-Palestine activity, even curtailed a conversation. The silencing process inflicts emotional distress, which can either induce affective containment and thus reinforce silence or else stimulate collective resistance. Congenial spaces for critical discussions build self-confidence to resist the silencing pressures and the university’s complicity, thus agentializing pro-Palestine voices. The typology can inform strategies for more effective resistance.