Gaza, Identity & Solidarity with Ala Sirriyeh & Aaron Winter

Surviving Society Productions

In this episode of Surviving Society, in collaboration with the Identities Podcast, Ala Sirriyeh and Aaron Winter discuss their thoughts and experiences in the 10 months since 7 October and what has occurred in Gaza and globally, including on UK university campuses, as colleagues and friends in an ongoing dialogue, scholars and educators working on racism and refugees, co-founders of Sociologists in Solidarity with Palestinians (SISP), and in relation to their identities as a Palestinian and Jew.

Ala is a British Palestinian sociologist of migration with a primary focus on child and youth migration and activism. Her first monograph Inhabiting Borders, Routes Home: Youth, Gender, Asylum (Routledge 2013) explore refugee young women's experiences of home in the context of their transitions to adulthood. Her second monograph, The Politics of Compassion: Immigration and Asylum Policy (Bristol University Press, 2018) explored border controls and resistance in Britain, the US and Australia, investigating the central and nuanced role of emotions in this context. She is currently a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow and beginning her project titled Britain’s Child Migrants: Nation and Connected Migrations.

She is a member of the Sociologists in Solidarity with Palestinians (SISP) collective.

SISP Statements – Sociologists In Solidarity with Palestinians (wordpress.com)

Some recent publications:

Sirriyeh, A. (2024, June 11). ‘Why are the soldiers hurting Palestinian children?’: Parenthood, identity and culture during genocide [Online]. The Sociological Review Magazine. https://doi.org/10.51428/tsr.xfsb6417

Sirriyeh, A. (2023) Emotions and emotional reflexivity in undocumented migrant youth activism, The Sociological Review, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380261231173753.

Aaron Winter is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Director of the Centre for Alternatives to Social and Economic Inequalities (CASEI) at Lancaster University. His research is on the far right focusing on racism, terrorism and mainstreaming. He is co-editor of Historical Perspectives on Organized Crime and Terrorism (Routledge 2018), Researching the Far Right: Theory, Method and Practice (Routledge 2020), and co-author, with Aurelien Mondon, of Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream (Verso 2020). He has also published in the Ethnic and Racial Studies, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Journal of Political Ideologies, Sociological Research Online and Women and Performance, as well as OpenDemocracy, The Independent, Novara Media and Jacobin. and has been interviewed by BBC. LBC, NBC, Times Radio, France24, Al Jazeera, The Times, NewStatesman, Wired, Vice, HuffPost, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Kathimerini and the Financial Times. He is co-editor of the journal Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power and the MUP series Racism, Resistance and Social Change, and on the editorial board of Ethnic and Racial Studies and the organising committee of the Reactionary Politics Research Network.

Aaron’s selected writing on Gaza, anti-zionism, antisemitism and racism

Israel-Palestine: Conflating antisemitism and anti-zionism emboldens the far right | openDemocracy

Briefing: Islamophobia and Antisemitism – Community Policy Forum

Suella Braverman’s Resignation Could Be the Best Thing That Ever Happened to the Far Right | Novara Media

On Gary Lineker’s tweet, the politics of comparison and denial of racism (identitiesjournal.com)