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My statement delivered in ICA 2026 Oceania Hub. Aotearoa New Zealand.

 



My statement delivered in ICA 2026 Oceania Hub. Aotearoa New Zealand. 

For two days in Palmerston North, on land that tangata whenua never ceded, scholars and movement workers from Palestine and across the colonised world gathered under one banner: communicative equality against empire. We studied how voice is organised, who is made audible and who is made to disappear, how the infrastructures of speech are built to serve power. Then we turned to our own house.

Silence in the face of empire is complicity. The Oceania Hub of the International Communication Association condemns the Executive Committee's prolonged institutional silence on the catastrophe in Palestine. For nearly two years after October 2023, as Gaza endured mass killing, forced displacement, the deliberate destruction of universities, hospitals, and entire knowledge ecosystems, and what numerous international legal authorities have named as genocide, the ICA's leadership chose strategic muteness. When a statement finally arrived on 11 September 2025, it was diluted and equivocal, a document that told us more about the Association's investment in institutional caution than about any commitment to justice, human rights, or scholarly integrity.

That statement is an exercise in both-sidesism and moral evasion. It mourns "violence and loss of life in Gaza, Israel, and the West Bank" in a single breath, and in that same breath it erases the asymmetry between a nuclear-armed occupying power and a besieged, dispossessed people held under decades of settler-colonial control. It hides behind the supposed complexity of the issue. The same leadership found no such complexity when it moved swiftly to condemn Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This is the communicative inversion at the heart of empire's grammar: the language of balance performing fairness while it aligns the Association with the powerful, the language of neutrality manufacturing consent for the violence it will not name. The selective silence on Palestine sits beside silence on school shootings, on the dismantling of academic freedom, on the rise of authoritarianism. The pattern is clear. Leadership speaks when speech is convenient and falls quiet when naming empire would cost it something.

This is not neutrality. It is complicity.

As the Oceania Hub, convened in Aotearoa on the unceded lands of tangata whenua, we are positioned and obligated to refuse this timidity. Our theme, communicative equality against empire: socialism, anticapitalism, anticolonialism, antiimperialism, names the structures the central statement spends its energy evading. Hosted by the Center for Culture-Centered Approach to Research and Evaluation at Massey University, we gather to treat empire as a structuring condition of communicative life. We do this from inside a settler state that knows its own history of colonisation, and from that location we understand how silence sustains domination, how balance so often masks alignment with power, and how communication scholarship has to choose its side when genocide is livestreamed and the infrastructures of Palestinian knowledge are annihilated.

The work of these two days is the work the ICA claims to value. Scholars, organisers, and movement workers from Palestine, the Global South, and settler contexts came together here to examine voice sovereignty, media repair, refusal as method, and the manufacture of consent for imperial violence. This is the scholarship the Association's leadership failed to centre and failed to defend at the moment it mattered most.

The Executive Committee's gestures arrive years late and change nothing on the ground. Fifteen thousand dollars in travel funds and a handful of special sessions do not rebuild a bombed university or return a silenced scholar to her classroom. We are not interested in reputational management. We ask that the ICA Executive Committee:

  • Issue an unambiguous statement that names the occupation, condemns the genocide in Gaza, and recognises the systematic destruction of Palestinian knowledge production.
  • Provide substantial and sustained material support for Palestinian scholars: emergency funds, reconstruction partnerships, and open-access publishing.
  • Actively defend members who face censorship, doxxing, and professional retaliation for speaking on Palestine.
  • Build decolonial, anticolonial, and anti-imperial frameworks into the core of the Association's programming and policy, rather than relegating them to optional hubs.

We will not perform balance in the face of empire. We stand with our Palestinian colleagues and with all those who resist colonial violence. Communication scholarship worthy of the name refuses complicity and works for liberation. Name the genocide. Defend the scholars. Choose a side.

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