What is an Open Societal Challenge? 

The Open University Open Societal Challenges Programme functions through a community of researchers who work together to address particular Challenge.  In the context of the OSC Programme, a Challenge is an ambitious yet achievable programme of research with long-term vision aimed at addressing a specific societal issue. 

The OU Palestine Solidarity Group has successfully secured approval for a programme of research entitled: ​​Tackling Inequalities through Transdisciplinary Decolonial Research: The “Palestine Exception”. 

OSC Outline 

This OSC centres the example of Israel/Palestine to transform decolonisation agendas and related research. It probes the forces that drive “The Palestine Exception” [1], including settler-colonial legacies of its Western supporters (US, UK and EU), as manifest in university procedures and political pressures. Our goal is to de-exceptionalise Israel/Palestine through education, partnerships with other university Palestine solidarity groups and national campaigns to build a transdisciplinary decolonisation research network and, finally, developing a longer-term programme of research on operationalising a transformed university agenda on decolonisation.   ​  

Our objective is the establishment of a transdisciplinary decolonisation research network. By “transdisciplinary”, we mean framing research questions and perspectives through engagement with diverse stakeholder perspectives, in ways accountable to them, thus posing a challenge for narrow disciplinary academic expertise. This includes non-academic stakeholders, third-sector organisations and decolonisation campaigns.   

The OSC’s Vision 

The long-term change we seek is to challenge university decolonisation strategies to do more than improve representation in the curricula. They should also address the material consequences of settler colonialism, in both global and UK contexts. We seek to transform decolonisation agendas towards identifying and questioning (neo)colonial mindsets that pervade our institutions and policies, impacting how we conceptualise “progress”, “knowledge”, “development” and international law, as well as global distinctions between what is central and peripheral, the broader political economy, our shared environment and our limited natural resources.    

De-exceptionalising Palestine is key to this transformation. It reverses the gaze on settler-colonial projects, from the West (with their colonial legacies) to the colonised. This exposes the persistence ofsettler-colonial structures and their global entanglements, generating ethical grounds for pressuring institutions and governments to address and prevent the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. Within universities, we must explore how policies, procedures and common practices are implemented differently within different contexts and what this means for educational curricula, research councils’ agendas and “decolonising the university” initiatives.  

In this connection, we have been exploring the following questions:   

1. Why is Israel/Palestine the exception in how Western democracies (in particular) view international law regarding the actions of settler-colonial states?  
2. What problematic issues are surfaced by highlighting Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid role? and the decolonial forces seeking to disrupt that role?  
3. What more happens when Palestine is de-exceptionalised? 

The Challenge Team 

The OU Palestine Solidarity Group, which makes up the challenge team, includes Academic and non-Academic staff, PhD students, Early Career Researchers, Staff Tutors, Senior Researchers and Professors.  Our fields of activity/research are highly interdisciplinary and include Palestine action and solidarity, grassroots organising, applied linguistics, decolonial computing and critical information studies, the political economy, art and anthropology, as well as global development. Moreover, we come from a range of backgrounds, lived experiences and cultural influences and have different connections to Israel/Palestine, including heritage.